Mexicans Belong in Mexico

The illegal ones, anyway.

The legal resident alien green card holders can stay. The Mexican-Americans obviously can stay. Is that radical, arrogant or racist? Fine, call me names. Scream and yell.

Let’s look at some other arguments:

Argentinians belong in Argentina. Haitians belong in Haiti. Russians belong in Russia. Chinese belong in China. Indians belong in India. The illegal ones, anyway. If they want to jump through the hoops and become resident aliens and from there citizens, all the power to them. It may take 15 years.

Presidente Jorge Boosh wants to give illegals one day to automagically turn into some kind of Z-card legal citizens. What a slap in the face to all the green card holders, legal immigrants and others who spent so much money, filled out so many forms, and waited so long to secure their dream.

Why would anyone do it the legal way ever again when they can just go illegal and do it on the easy and cheap?

Suppose we had 12 million Argentines, or Chileans, or Indonesians, or Costa Ricans, or Uruguayans, or Dominicans, or Albanians, or Egyptians, or Angolans, or Bangladeshis, or Nepalis, or Laotians, or New Guineans, all illegals, invading our shores? Would it make any difference? Regardless of their plights, they belong in their own countries.

If their reactionary, nightmare, third world rat holes suck, well, then, they need to make revolution there, hopefully peaceful revolution. In some cases, maybe with the gun. That’s the Leftist in me talking.

Name one Communist country that insanely opened its borders to anyone who wanted to invade in order to crush the working class of their own land. There never was one. Marxist rulers were not stupid. They defended their borders and their workers.

Why do their lunatic acolytes believe in the insanity of “open borders”, with its massive security risks and attendant ruination of the American working class?

“But people are so desperate in Mexico”…Wa wa wa. Yes! People are desperate, starving and living in horrible conditions the world over. Why single out Mexicans? If desperate Mexicans get a free get out of jail pass to invade America, why not open up our borders to the miserable of the entire Third World, many of whom are far worse off than the average Mexican?

“But the Mexicans have children!” Hell, everyone has children. All over the world, people have kids. No kidding! So everyone who has kids, and I guess is desperate too, gets to invade America and drive our wages into the gutter forever. Surveys show that about 1/2 to 1/3 of the population would come to the US if they had the chance. That is 2-3 billion human beings.

This is what the lunatic Left and cheap labor Right in the open borders Lobby wants. Can you imagine? After that 2 billion man march on America occurs, America will be Calcutta writ large. And we can sign the death warrant on our republic, too.

The vast majority of nations in the world do not allow visiting or residing Americans, or anyone else I guess, to work, as long as you are living in or visiting the country. Why? They are leaving those positions open for their own people. The Open Borders loons would say that virtually every country on Earth, then, is racist, for not letting foreigners work in the land.

Even if that is racist (let is play games for a moment) is that really such a bad thing? And if the vast majority of nations are viciously racist, does the word mean anything anymore?

Many nations make it quite hard to become a citizen. The Arab World is notorious for this. The Koreans and Japanese have decided that the future residents of their land should be overwhelmingly Koreans and Japanese. And they are not the only ones. This is very common the world over.

Where is the Open Borders crowd? Why are they not screaming at the Arabs, Koreans and Japanese for being horrible racists? How dare these nations exercise sovereignty over the question of citizenship in their lands!

After all, the only way to be nonracist is to open your borders to any army of invaders that wants to invade, to grant the invaders citizenship on demand when they arrogantly demand it, and to let them steal every job they can from your citizens. Now that we know hat it takes to be a “racist” and a “nonracist”, “racism” is starting to look like sanity, eh? (Being sarcastic here).

Bipartisan Support for Slavery in America

Here.

This stunning article from Alternet touches on a subject that no US news outlet will touch as they are all corporate outlets: the profound and inhumane abuse of immigrants via the H-2B guestworker program. On its surface, the H-2B program has no right to exist at all. Its existence is based on the notion that for some bizarre reason, the employer cannot find any or enough Americans to fill the needed the jobs. Nevertheless, most H-2B workers work in places with double digit unemployment.

The last time I was in Yosemite, where I formerly lived, the place was swarming with H-2B guestworkers. When I lived there in 1977, there was not a single job that went open for lack of a US worker to fill it. Now that corporate criminal Delaware North has taken over concessions from the more fair though still abusive Curry Company, many to most of the positions are filled with H-2B guestworkers, easier to abuse and mistreat.

The list of jobs in need of H-2B guestworkers is utterly amazing. One of them is “welder.” In shipyards all up and down the US Gulf Coast, thousands of welding jobs formerly filled by proud American workers are now filled by hyper-exploited H-2B guestworkers. Apparently, “welder” is one of those jobs that Americans just won’t do.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush Administration quickly passed a directive allowing enforcement-free mass importation of immigrants, legal and illegal, to do cleanup and rebuilding work in New Orleans. That there were countless able-bodied Blacks in New Orleans was overlooked, or maybe it wasn’t. This directive was passed for one reason and one reason only – so that corporations exploiting the rebuilding process would not have to hire New Orleans Blacks, or any Americans for that matter, to do the work. Instead, tens of thousands of post-Katrina jobs that could have gone to the desperate Blacks of New Orleans went to 25,000 illegal alien criminals.

Scarcely a single word was heard in protest of this directive. All Democrats and all US liberals will fall all over themselves to do anything to worship the Illegal Alien and Immigrant God that they prostrate themselves over. Conservatives will not say a peep because immigrants, legal and illegal cheaply replace costly US workers, On both sides of the aisle, on the Left and the Right, the polarized sides of the political chamber fall all over themselves to beat the US worker to a bloody mass of a pulp.

And it is true: If liberals and Democrats could replace the vast majority of US workers with immigrants, legal or illegal, no matter how exploited, they would do it in a heartbeat. And there is not a conservative who would not do the same.

The abuses of the H-1B program among tech workers in the US and especially in Silicon Valley are many and legion. Yet the loudest champions of the program, a knife expertly aimed at the pulsing heart of the US tech worker, are US Democrats, often liberal Democrats. Of course all Republicans support the plan. And Barack Obama loves nothing so much as he loves his H-1B wage slaves and job thieves.

It is interesting that a progressive organization, in this case, the sickening worms of Morris Dees’ SPLC, are actually protesting about abuses of US workers under the H-2B program. It is incredible that anyone on the Left would attack worker abuses of any kind. Yet the truth is sadder than it appears. The SPLC only wrote this report because the workers being abused were their cherished immigrants. The SPLC would never waste a tear on US workers. Like the rest of the US Left, they care only about immigrant job-thieves. There is no room in their heart for the abused American worker. US workers only get the sympathy of the Left if they hail from some foreign shore.

And what is the SPLC’s solution to the abuses of the H-2B program? A responsible position would be to support the reforms of the program outlined a bill killed with the indispensable help of Senate Democrats. But we know that the SPLC goes far beyond this. The SPLC, like the entire US Left, is an Open Borders organization. Their preferred solution would be abolish the H-2B program and open the US borders to hundreds of millions from the around the world who would quickly funnel through through our ungated edges.

And so we have it: when it comes to US workers, we truly have no friends. The Democrats and Republicans are both corporate capitalist parties, and as such will always oppose the workers when the interests of the workers and our elected leaders corporate masters collide. Selling one’s soul is simple, but it always comes with a price. And indeed, the loudest champions of the horrific slave labor abuses of the H-2B programs have been Democrats, including Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, usually typed as a liberal Democrat.

What we need is a pro-working class party in America. A party that will always or nearly always side with working class Americans, and I emphasize Americans. In the conflict between American workers and foreign invaders and job thieves, the position of the working class party should be obvious.

“We Are Not Conservatives,” by Alex Stark

Here.

Excellent piece by Alex Stark on Greg Johnson’s White nationalist site Counter Currents. Johnson, who is gay by the way, is a very interesting figure on the WN scene. Economically, he’s more of a socialist, a Leftist or a populist, and he wants WN’s to make a major break with radical neoliberal Libertarian capitalism.

It’s been obvious for too long that Libertarian capitalism and the plutocratic Republican is bad for the White masses. That’s as clear as air.

Are all White people rich or corporate stooges? Of course not. Most White people are simply workers. And the plutocrats and corporate fascists abuse White workers as much as any other workers. In fact, they often single out White workers for abuse by mass importing both legal and illegal immigrants to replace them with and by replacing good White workers with cheap non-White labor from abroad.

Of course national health care is good for Whites. So is Medicaid. So is Medicare. So is subsidized and well funded state schooling, parks, public lands, roads, infrastructure and whatnot. I even believe the safety net is good for Whites.

I know some White middle class folks who have fallen on hard times who are now making use of Food Stamps so they can afford food. So Food Stamps are good for Whites. I know some Whites on disability who are using Section 8. Without Section 8, they wouldn’t even be able to afford rent. So Section 8 is good for poor Whites.

They are not that many government programs that are bad for Whites except for affirmative action, and that’s being phased out.

Under Obama, millions of illegals were deported, and there were many fines and raids on businesses for hiring illegals. That’s the state taking positive action against illegals.

What has the glorious private sector done to halt illegal immigration? Exactly nothing except hire illegals any chance they get. And state border guards have captured countless illegals at the border and deported them back home. So the state in various forms, especially at the state level such as Arizona, has been the only thing that has helped Whites in terms of illegal immigration.

The Republican Party has launched a War on Women. The vast majority of the female targets of this war are White women. So this party is attacking our women.

This party has also launched an all out war on unions. Unions are great for White workers. They’re great for Whites. The only reason that White workers were able to afford middle class incomes since World War 2 was due to unions that aggressively represented their interests. The decline in unions has gone hand in hand with a collapsing White middle class and the growth of a large group of poor and low income Whites.

The Republican Party through its judges pushed through Citizens United which allows the rich and corporations to control our nation through a corporate capitalist fascism that is disastrous for White workers, White consumers, the environment that Whites live in, White society as a whole and White democracy (the democratic values that Whites hold so dear).

Bottom line is that not only is that only possible savior of Whites to be found in the state (forget the private sector – they sold us out long ago) but also that the Republican Party is simply bad for Whites. That it’s good for a few rich Whites is no matter. The truth is that if it’s bad for the vast majority of Whites, it’s bad for Whites period.

“Washington and the Cuban Revolution Today: Ballad of a Never-Ending Policy: Part I – The Myth of the Miami Lobby, by Ike Nahem

Very nice piece on Cuba on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The first of a 3-part series. Warning: long, runs to 50 pages on the Net.

The Obama Administration, consistent with the approach of the Bush Administration, has made a political decision to subordinate foreign policy and national interest-based decisions to domestic politics with respect to its Cuba policy.

There is a bipartisan group of members of Congress – Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate – who represent Florida, a state where there are many swing votes that deliver the electoral votes for any president.

These individuals not only deliver votes, but they deliver campaign finance, and generally make a lot of noise, and that combination has persuaded the White House that reelection is more of a priority than taking the heavy lifting to set the United States on the path of -normalization with Cuba for now.

– Julia Sweig, Director for Latin American Studies, US Council on Foreign Relations

The essential continuity of US anti-Cuba policy under the Barack Obama Administration has been a source of mystery and confusion to many who oppose US sanctions. Within the US academic, think-tank, and media meritocracies – who often go in and out of government office – many are frustrated, even embarrassed, by Washington’s continued pariah status over Cuba in Latin America and internationally as registered in annual lopsided, humiliating votes against the US policy in the United Nations.

So why does Washington’s economic and political war against Cuba – the longest unchanged foreign policy in US history, entering its sixth decade – persist? Why is Cuba such an outsize question in US politics?

Why does Washington continue a policy that is utterly isolated in world and regional forums, holding up US diplomats and policymakers to derision and contempt?

The stated reasons given – the supposed lack of “democracy” and “human rights” in Cuba – reek with such misinformation, half-truths, obvious hypocrisy and arbitrary selectivity that they cannot be taken seriously and must be dismissed out of hand. I will comprehensively take up the question of democratic rights, human rights, civil liberties and the Cuban Revolution in Part III of this essay.

The most common explanation for these questions is expressed in the quotation by Julia Sweig that opens this essay.

Sweig is a scholar with the super-Establishment Council on Foreign Relations and is their Director for Latin America Studies. She is the author of the excellent book Inside the Cuban Revolution and is a very informed observer and analyst of Cuban history and politics. She is unquestionably a strong opponent of US sanctions against Cuba and in favor of normalized diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana.

Sweig and other dissenters within Establishment circles, as well as many elected officials purportedly opposed to US policy, point to, or at, the Cuban-American population and elected officials who form in Washington a so-called, and supposedly so-powerful, “Miami Lobby.” Some even go so far as to say US policy and “national interest” is being held “hostage” by this “Lobby.” Such nonsense crosses over into virtual conspiracy theories.

This argument and explanation turns political reality on its head. It has never been true and, in today’s world, it has never been less credible. It is a myth and an illusion that the Cuban-American community and Cuban-American office-holding politicians are the driving, determining force behind US policies toward Cuba. US foreign policy in general, and Cuba policy in particular, is driven by the interests of the US ruling capitalist class of bosses, bankers, and bondholders.

It is primarily mediated through its two political parties and state institutions and secondarily through its big-business media, think tanks, and academic minions. Cuban-American bourgeois politicians are part of that mix, prominent, but far from decisive.

Washington has never, and does not now, need the aging representatives of the ex-ruling powers of Cuba, or their descendants, to explain to them why they should oppose the Cuban Revolution and the domestic and international policies of the revolutionary socialist Cuban government.

The actual political affect of the “Miami Lobby” myth (which through endless repetition has become almost a mantra) is to take the political focus off the US government and place it on the Cuban-American community and a handful of Cuban-American elected officials. It puts the cart before the horse, the caboose at the head of the train

Such politicians of Cuban origin in the US Congress as Republican Florida representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart, Democratic New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, and Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio can be useful as a cover or a foil for a US policy that is so unpopular. Cuban-Americans can be blamed and chided by those opposed to the policy and praised and defended by those in favor of the policy. But they do not make the policy.

The myth of the “Miami Lobby” cuts across building a broad protest movement and the kind of effective action that can actually force a change in the policy. By homogenizing (or worse, demonizing) the contradictory and increasingly polarized Cuban-American community, the myth of the “Miami Lobby” has become an obstacle to winning over more Cuban-Americans to oppose US sanctions.

The fact is that for over five decades now there has been a bipartisan policy and a common goal of defeating and eradicating the Cuban Revolution. None of this has ever been, or is it now, primarily motivated by the interests of the Cuban-American exile community in Miami.

The origins and continuity of Washington’s hostility to the Cuban Revolution is homegrown. It flows out of the politics, policies and example of the Cuban Revolution – both inside Cuba and in its resonance across the Americas and internationally in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and even inside the advanced capitalist powers.

The Impact of the Cuban Revolution on US Politics

Cuba appears, and is presented as, a minor question in US politics and foreign policy. This is all the more so since the end of the so-called “Cold War” and its decades-long conflict and clash between Washington and Moscow. In those days Washington’s lurid propaganda painted Cuba’s revolutionary government as a “client” and “puppet” of the former Soviet Union.

While this was always consciously insulting and factually absurd, the alliance of Cuba with the Soviet bloc was used to fabricate a Cuban “threat” to the US and the American people. (October 2012 will be the 50th anniversary of the traumatic “Cuban Missile Crisis, which was used to convince many working people in the United States on the “threat” from Cuba.)

Independent of the Soviet Union, the “Cuba Question,” that is the political dynamics and impact of the Cuban Revolution, has always had major weight and importance in US politics and foreign policy, especially in the Americas. This remains the case today even though Cuba is a small island of less than 12 million people and the United States is a globe-straddling economic, financial, political, and military superpower, albeit in relative decline today on all these fronts.

The end of the “Cold War” and the political disappearance of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies over 20 years ago has not seen any easing up of US anti-Cuba policy. On the contrary, it has essentially deepened.

The consensus of the US ruling class and central policymakers remains that Washington’s economic and political war against Cuba must remain and continue in today’s post-Cold War. That world reality has developed into a new era, if not historical epoch, defined by the worst generalized economic and financial crisis of the world capitalist system since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In public US politicians mock, deride, and denigrate Cuba, it is clear that both ruling parties in Washington continue to see Cuba as a formidable political force with significant moral and political authority, especially in the Americas, but worldwide. There is virtual unanimity in both parties that the revolutionary Cuban government needs to be confronted and defeated, not reconciled with on the basis of respect for Cuban sovereignty.

From Washington’s point of view, the Cuban government promotes anti-imperialist (or, as they falsely put it, “anti-American”) revolutionary action, has not renounced the program of international socialist revolution, and, short of that, supports any policies and struggles that defend the interests of workers, peasants, and youth.

Such a perspective clearly impacts negatively on the economic interests of US capital and Washington’s political and “strategic” prerogatives in defense of those interests.

Tactical Divisions Over Cuba Policy

It is common on the “US Left” to become politically disoriented and disarmed (and safely in the hands of “lesser evil” liberals and Democrats) by the intense and even brutal forms expressed over what are in actual substance relatively minor tactical differences over policy between the two imperialist parties and within the ruling class in the United States. Cuba is a classic case in point.

Every year in the United Nations there is a lopsided (in 2011 it was 186 for and 2 against with 3 abstentions) anti-Washington vote on the “Necessity of Ending the Economic, Commercial and Financial Embargo Imposed by the United States against Cuba” that gets bare mention in the US corporate media.

Across the Americas, Washington’s anti-Cuba policies are routinely ridiculed and opposed in every Hemispheric and regional forum, including “Summits” of the Organization of American States, traditionally a servile tool of US policy and Hemispheric domination.

Cuba’s strong defense of its sovereignty, its revolutionary ideas, and its practice of international solidarity with oppressed and exploited humanity, has given the socialist island important political and moral authority and weight in world politics – way out of proportion to its size, numbers, economic strength, or military firepower.

This is a cause of great irritation and consternation for the US rulers and their acolytes of the “Miami Lobby.” But it is a great testament to the power of ideas in the world. In truth there is no greater power on earth than when progressive and revolutionary ideas inspire and grip millions and become a material political force.

How to achieve the common goal of overturning the Cuban government in real political time naturally leads to furious tactical differences within the US government and within and between the Democratic and Republican parties who share and exercise power in the US capitalist state. This is inevitable given how isolated and unpopular the US anti-Cuba policy is in the Americas, in the world, and even inside the United States.

Maneuvers, shifts, and concessions occur from one year to the next, and from one White House to the next, all reacting to the pressure of events. It’s all aimed at positioning Washington off the defensive in order to more effectively disorient, undermine, and overwhelm the Cuban Revolution.

Obama vs. Bush

President Obama has made some shifts and even partial retreats from the anti-Cuba rules enforced by George W. Bush. These are objectively positive. It’s good that some Cuban musicians, artists and scholars have been allowed into the US at the invitation of universities and cultural institutions.

It’s good that Cuban-Americans are allowed to travel to their country of origin without the previous insulting bureaucratic restrictions. It’s better than before that rules for licenses allowing limited travel to Cuba by other US citizens have been relatively loosened.

These moves by the Obama Administration are in no way a shift away from the basic US policy of “regime change,” that is, destroying the Cuban Revolution. They basically move US rules back to the norms under the Clinton Administration and the first period of the George W. Bush Administration, before they were tightened up with the triumphalist hubris that followed the US invasion of Iraq.

At that time Bush selected Otto Reich as his Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, along with other important figures among the counter-revolutionary exile groupings such as Roger Noriega, a former top staffer for ultra-right, notoriously racist North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. Such were the personnel directing the Hemispheric policies of Bush’s Administration.

But this did not work out well for US policy and position in Latin America, particularly after Washington’s (and Reich’s) fingerprints were found all over the failed April 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela against the popular, elected government of Hugo Chavez. Bush was forced to remove both Reich and then later his successor Noriega and retreat from the hyper-arrogant rhetoric and posturing toward Latin America that became politically costly to Washington.

What Obama has done is shift away from the more bellicose language and Bush-style bombast around Cuba by making minimal adjustments in policy around travel and visa rules to try and undo the political damage of the Bush years.

Nevertheless, Obama has been quite strikingly unsuccessful in winning any support for the US anti-Cuba position in the Americas, which remains completely isolated, excepting the right-wing Stephen Harper government in Ottawa. Canada still continues to be the largest source of tourism to Cuba and carries out considerable commercial exchange with the island.

Under Obama, the Treasury and Justice Departments have stepped up harassment and prosecutions of US or foreign businesses deemed to “violate” US “rules” and sanctions against commercial and financial exchange and collaboration with Cuba. Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon recently stated, in an interview with French academic and journalist Salim Lamrani:

…[T]he Obama administration has been considerably more consistent in the imposition of fines and sanctions against foreign companies who violate the framework of sanctions against Cuba, that engage in business transactions with us…

A number of banks have been fined several millions of dollars, more than 100 million in one case, for conducting dollar-based business transactions and for having opened dollars accounts with Cuban companies.

On June 12, 2012 it was announced by the US Department of Justice that the Dutch Bank ING agreed to a $619 million fine for violating the US “Trading with the Enemy Act,” by moving US currency from trades with Cuba (and also Iran) through US financial networks. According to the online Guardian Express Newspaper, “The fine is considered to be the largest ever in the history of the US financial system.”

Since the Obama Administration took office in 2009 major European banks Credit Suisse, Barclays, and Lloyds have reached similar settlements with the US government over financial dealings with Cuba.

The Obama Administration continues to support and promote State Department and CIA overt and covert programs that aim at subverting and undermining the Cuban government, and which landed State Department agent Alan Gross in a Cuban prison.

The idea that Gross’s conviction and incarceration is the impediment to improved US-Cuban relations which Obama wants to pursue is a very bad joke.

Washington’s actions in dispatching agents like Gross – just one instance of a large-scale policy of unremitting economic and political war against Cuba funded to the tune of many dozens of millions of dollars in openly budgeted allocations, not counting resources used for covert programs – represents the real impediment to improved and normalized relations.

Obama’s State Department continues to keep Cuba on its list of “nations supporting terrorism,” a huge lie and vile slander. Obama continues to ignore Cuban diplomatic initiatives for bilateral cooperation around issues such as drug trafficking and hurricane response coordination. Obama continues to resist the unanimous opinion of Latin American and Caribbean member states of the Organization of American States to end the exclusion of Cuba.

Obama continues to dismiss and resist any attempts to negotiate mechanisms, including any “exchanges,” that would release the Cuban Five, four of whom are in their 14th year of incarceration, while one, Rene Gonzalez, was released after serving his full term, but is not being allowed to return home to Cuba.

Another clear sign of the essential continuity in Obama’s anti-Cuba policy from the Bush Administration – and really all previous White Houses since Eisenhower – is in Obama’s appointment of Ricardo Zuniga as “Director for Western Hemispheric Affairs” for the White House National Security Council. Zuniga was formerly a key player in the US Interests Section in Havana under Bush, organizing the extreme provocations against Cuba led by Interests Section Chief James Cason.

Looking at the balance sheet of Obama’s policies toward Cuba compared to that of George W. Bush, recalls the classic line of Groucho Marx: “I’ve worked myself up to nothing from a state of extreme poverty.”

Waves and Patterns of Cuban Emigration to the US

There have always been Cuban workers who emigrated to, lived, and worked in the United States. However, the origin and formation of a mass Cuban-American “community” began with the large-scale emigration after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

Like all genuine social revolutions, the Cuban Revolution was marked by deep-going and irreversible class struggle and polarization. In the first period after the Cuban Revolution some 5% of the then Cuban population of 6 million made its way to Florida and the US where it was received with open arms and special privileges as “refugees from communism,” obviating regular immigration requirements.

The first wave of exiles were overwhelmingly from the Cuban ruling classes, their supporters, hangers on, and enforcers in the military and police apparatuses, as well as the extensive organized–crime networks – narcotics marketers, brothel owners and pimps, casino magnates, and so on – that flourished in the Batista era.

As the Cuban Revolution began to implement radical economic and social policies that benefited peasants, agricultural and industrial workers, and the impoverished majority in general, large layers of the relatively small Cuban middle and professional classes followed the largest landowners, capitalists, army officers, cops, and gangsters into exile.

While a small minority, it was nevertheless hundreds of thousands of people.

One example of this pattern was in the over 50% of the 6,000 doctors in Cuba who left the country after the Revolution. These doctors overwhelmingly served the Cuban upper and middle classes. The average Cuban rarely, if ever, saw a doctor their entire life. Life expectancy was in the low 50s. Infant mortality was over 60 per 1000, among the world’s highest.

Today Cuba graduates 10,000 new doctors every year; life expectancy is approaching 80 and infant mortality is 4.5 per 1000, among the world’s lowest.

Additionally it should be noted that these first waves of emigrant-exiles were overwhelmingly Caucasian; among the most far-reaching policies of the revolutionary Cuban government was the smashing of Jim Crow-style segregation laws and policies on the island. Cubans of African origin were among the strongest and most enthusiastic supporters and protagonists of the Revolution, which was echoed in the wide support for the Cuban Revolution among African-Americans in the United States.

Of course, there was no mechanical one-to one political correspondence in the class polarization that accompanied the Cuban Revolution. Not every middle-class Cuban opposed the Revolution and split to Miami; a good number were in support or ambivalent but patriotic.

For an excellent portrayal of this early period of the Revolution from the vantage point of an alienated middle-class Cuban, see the masterful, world-acclaimed Cuban film Memories of Underdevelopment, directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea.

And there were a small number of workers, peasants, and Afro-Cubans who actively supported the counterrevolution. Nevertheless, it is an indisputable fact that the large majority of the Cuban population at the time, and overwhelmingly so among working people, peasants, youth, and Black Cubans, embraced the Revolution as their own work and actively defended it.

Many thousands of Cuban exiles were recruited by the US military and intelligence apparatus for covert action against Cuba. Business and financial opportunities were established for the Cuban ex-bourgeoisie in south Florida by their US government and business benefactors.

The US Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966, which allowed for quick permanent residency and expedited citizenship for declared opponents of the Revolution. Over $1.3 billion, nearly $10 billion in current dollar value, was allocated for direct financial assistance to exiles.

The Mariel Boatlift

Over several months in 1980, a series of provocations against Cuba by the James “Jimmy” Carter Administration, working with the conservative Peruvian military government, led to gatherings of up to 10,000 Cubans at the Peruvian Embassy in Havana wanting to leave the country. (Millions of Cubans mobilized at this time in support of the Revolution.)

The death of a Cuban police guard at the Peruvian Embassy led the Cuban government to declare a policy of allowing all Cubans who wanted to leave the island to bypass existing legal processes. Cuban-Americans were invited to come pick up their relatives at the Mariel Harbor. Some 125,000 additional Cubans arrived in the US during the so-called Mariel Boatlift.

Today the Brazilian government and companies are working with Cuba in a major industrial project to make Mariel a state-of-the-world port for freight and trade which, when completed and operational, will be a major boost for the Cuban economy.

This wave of exiles was of a much different social and class composition than the first waves.

They were more on the margins of Cuban society, unassimilated into the working class, indifferent or hostile to the revolutionary process in Cuba. Many had histories of petty criminal activity in areas with no operating space or “market” in Cuba such as gambling, loan sharking, commercial sex, and narcotics trafficking.

Most simply wanted to leave Cuba and go to the United States to join relatives or friends and pursue perceived business opportunities. They thought that the United States would be a far more fertile arena and market for their social and business – and criminal – proclivities.

US propaganda accused the Cuban government at the time of emptying its prisons and even mental hospitals and shoving “the dregs of Cuban society” onto boats bound for the US. Cuban authorities vehemently denied this and demanded proof of such deeds, which was never delivered, although the slander lived on.

For Fidel Castro’s passionate explanation of the entire affair and response to US slanders see, An Encounter With Fidel: An Interview With Gianni Mina, Ocean Press, pages 61-67.

The “Special Period” Wave

In the 1990s, under the severe economic conditions of what was called in Cuba the “Special Period,” following the collapse of the governments of the Soviet Union and Eastern European “socialist camp,” thousands more Cubans left the island lured by the Cuban Adjustment Act and the refusal of the US to implement agreements for legal, organized immigration.

The relative improvement of the Cuban economy in recent years and the ending of travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans under President Obama, combined with the onset of economic depression and crisis in the US and Europe, has reduced the volume and political volatility of Cuban emigration to the United States.

There are higher proportions of Irish and Israeli emigrants to the United States than Cubans, and this without either the expedited privileges of the Cuban Adjustment Act or the accompanying demonization and propaganda attacking those countries from the US government and big-business media.

Given the economic catastrophes currently gripping Greece, Spain, Portugal, and other “Eurozone” economies millions of working people have been displaced and forced to consider emigration. It would be interesting to look at immigration statistics in those countries compared to Cuba today. Many from Spain and Portugal are today even emigrating to Latin America.

In any case what stands out is that the large majority of Cuban working people continue to stand their ground in Cuba and to fight for their revolution despite the Cuban Adjustment Act, despite unremitting US threats, sanctions, and a sense of siege, and despite often grinding economic conditions. Today these Cubans are debating and fighting to improve and change what has to be changed

Elian Gonzalez

The case of Elian Gonzalez in the 1990s was a political turning point that highlighted the developing and roiling contradictions within the Cuban-American community. It set in motion politically centrifugal tendencies.

Public opinion in the US at the time overwhelmingly favored the right of Elian’s father to return to Cuba with his son. The right-wing counter-revolutionary circus in Miami acted out by Elian’s distant relatives, manipulated by right-wing Cuban American organizations, was viewed as distasteful and inhumane.

Washington tried every lure and trick to keep Elian in this country and – in what would have been a real propaganda coup – to entice his father to “defect.” But eventually they had to face the reality that this was not going to happen and that Cuban, Latin American, and US public opinion was becoming indignant.

Father and son were finally let go. The issue had riveted US politics for many months and was a real blow to the authority and political standing of the counter-revolutionary exile organizations and personalities.

The Cuban-American Community Today

Over 1.5 million people whose family origins are in Cuba are now citizens of the United States. Cuba’s current population is nearly 12 million people. Cuban-Americans are 4-5% of the Spanish-speaking US Latino population of over 40 million people.

Accurate figures are hard to specify given the large layers of undocumented working people who have migrated to enter a vast, illegal “black market” in labor to work in the fields, factories, and cities of the United States when such jobs were relatively plentiful.

These Spanish-speaking (or English, French, or Creole-speaking from the Caribbean, or Portuguese-speaking from Brazil) immigrants seeking to labor in the US came from every country and nationality, but only those of Cuban origin, under the Cuban Adjustment Act, get a very fast track to US citizenship and a legal existence to work and live.

Over three-fourths of Cuban-Americans live in Florida, 1.2 million people according to the 2010 US census. The next four states see a large numbers drop to a little over 80,000 in New Jersey and a little less than 80,000 in New York, some 75,000 in California and 35,000 in Texas. Florida is the fourth most populous US state with 18.8 million people; Cuban-Americans are less than 10% of that total.

Cuban-Americans are 30% of Florida’s Latino population. African-Americans are around 16% of Florida’s population, figures that in most counts include Black immigrants from the Caribbean. The Haitian population of south Florida is between 100-200,000 including many undocumented workers. Cubans make up 32 percent of eligible Latino voters, Puerto Ricans 28 percent, and Mexicans 9 percent.

It is absurd to extrapolate out of the size of the Cuban-American electorate an assertion that this “bloc” is decisive in “delivering” Florida’s electoral votes to a future President who must therefore “pander” to “extreme anti-Castro” positions. By manipulating statistics this could be said about any group, grouping, religious denomination or sect.

In a close race between Republicans and Democrats, don’t the 3% of Florida’s Jews become “decisive?” What about the 725,000 Puerto Ricans?

Why aren’t the Presidential campaigns pandering to the “pro-Aristide” views of Florida’s large Haitian population who by a large majority support the former Haitian President who was ushered out of country by the US military after a coup? (The anti-Aristide campaign was directly led by the above-mentioned Roger Noriega.)

The absurdity is further underscored by the fact that Florida’s Jews, Puerto Ricans, Haitians and the 70% non-Cuban Latinos are more preponderantly Democratic in their voting tendencies (if they bother, like a near-majority of eligible voters in general, to vote at all given the dismal choices), and opposed to US sanctions against Cuba than Cuban-Americans are supposedly preponderantly Republican and obsessively, knee-jerkedly, “anti-Castro.”

The truth is that, once given the legal right to do so, Cuban-Americans are defying the threats and admonitions of the Ros-Lehtinens, the Diaz-Balarts, the Menendezes, and the Rubios, that is, the Congressional faces of the “Miami Lobby,” and flocking to Cuba and reconnecting with their homeland and families.

Flights are packed and leave every day from Miami and weekly in a growing number of cities. They also rush to buy tickets and fill concert halls to see popular Cuban musicians like Los Van Van, who happen to identify with the Cuban Revolution. (On April 27, 2012 a fire was set at the company Airline Charters, one of the companies that arranges legal flights to Cuba.)

The fact is that the political domination of the old Batistaite ruling oligarchy and Cuban ex-bourgeoisie that became ensconced in South Florida and some enclaves in northern New Jersey is sputtering to the end of its era of sway. That ex-bourgeoisie was set up and established comfortably in business and with a cozy niche in US bourgeois politics over the broader Cuban-American community, and enjoyed a degree of immunity from US law by the US government

Very important, if not decisive, in this dynamic is the broader development and growth of the Latino population in the US that is not of Cuban origin and with a very different history and relationship to the “Cuba Question.”

Over decades there has been a growth and accumulated political weight in US society and politics of this broader Latino community, with a mass component of undocumented workers who were a needed source of cheap labor and high profits for US capitalists.

This broader Latino community comprises peoples of many national origins: Mexicans, Central Americans, Haitians (also concentrated in Miami as well as New York City) none of whom share the views toward Cuba, Fidel Castro, and the Cuban Revolution of the surviving first waves of immigrant-exiles from the 1960s.

The fact is that among many Latinos living and working in the United States there exists a significant degree of pride and respect, if not solidarity and affection, toward Cuba for standing up to the Yanquis with dignity, even among those far from agreeing with Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Marxist views.

In fact, it can be said that the children and grandchildren of the first waves of Cuban émigrés, who, in general, are hardly partisans of the Cuban Revolution, are nevertheless more objective and curious about Cuba, and more generally in favor of normalized relations and an end to US sanctions.

This generation of Cuban-Americans has undoubtedly been shaped as much by their experiences as Latinos in the US and by their interaction in the workplace with other Latino workers and other workers, Black and Caucasian, than by their status as second or third generation exiles from Cuba and the Cuban Revolution with all that political baggage.

The ex-bourgeoisie of Cuba, although many have prospered in business and bourgeois politics from their connections and status, is in no way integrated into the US ruling class.

The bulk of Cuban-Americans today are wage workers, professionals, and small business owners. Their political views are shaped and developed primarily by the broad issues of class politics in the United States and much less, and certainly not decisively, by the imperatives of “anti-Castro” exile politics. This is all the more true as so many Cuban-Americans visit the island and become familiar with the economic and political discussions and debates dominating Cuban society today.

The ultra-right grip of the ex-Cuban bourgeoisie, and the violent terrorists trained by the CIA, on Cuban-American political viewpoints regarding US-Cuba relations is unraveling.

Ever-growing numbers, at or near majority levels, of Cuban-Americans favor normal relations with the island and an end to economic and travel sanctions. It is precisely the growing pressure from Cuban-Americans that led the Obama Administration to lift the travel restrictions on that (and only that) section of the US population.

It is of great political significance that Washington finds it more difficult to credibly hide behind the Cuban American community to justify or rationalize its anti-Cuba policy. The “Miami Lobby” has always been the directed not the directors, the puppets not the puppeteers. Hopefully the purveyors of the false “Miami Lobby” line will catch up with political reality.

Ike Nahem is the coordinator of Cuba Solidarity New York a member of the National Network on Cuba. Nahem is an Amtrak Locomotive Engineer and member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a division of the Teamsters Union. These are his personal political opinions. He can be reached at: ikenahem@mindspring.com.

“Canada At Ground Level: Observations of a US Refugee,” by Odin Crow

Warning: Long, runs to 51 pages. This is a fine piece by US expat Odin Crow. Relax and enjoy it.

Canada At Ground Level: Observations of a US Refugee

By Odin Crow

I am an American citizen living in Canada. I am not a sociologist, anthropologist, economist, linguist or any other ist. What I am is a middle class, late 40s working-guy who wishes to share with you what he’s learned about his adopted country from his own personal experiences and hopefully dispel a few misconceptions at the same time. But first, my take on the differences in basic character of these two countries and how they came about.

A Tale Of Two Siblings

If Canada and the US were brothers, the US was the one who said “fuck you” to the parents and left home as a teen. Granted, mom and dad were treating him like shit; he was a breadwinner, the loud, risk-taking one with big plans and ambitions and, to be honest, mom and dad were oinking up the fruits of his labors without giving him any say in how the household was run.

Sure, mom and dad got him started, set him up with everything he needed to be successful, but the dynamic didn’t seem fair to Elder Brother, who went indy.

Canada, on the other hand was the brother who just wanted to live his life and be left alone. He didn’t ask for much from mom and dad; they gave him very little to work with and neglected him for the most part. But Younger Brother never complained and did receive the benefit of some guidance and wisdom from time to time as he grew up as well as help when he really needed it.

So Younger Brother kept his nose to the grindstone, worked hard, minded his own business and slowly built a nice sane, stable life for himself.

Meanwhile, after a nasty spat with the folks, who started it out of sheer vindictiveness (and whose side was taken by Younger Brother, since Elder Brother lashed out at him and, to be honest, Younger Brother was still basically an extension of Mom and Dad) Elder Brother built a dizzyingly dramatic, risk-taking, get-the-fuck-outta-my-way life for himself, with stellar highs and deep, abysmal lows, being sometimes unbelievably heroic and idealistic and sometimes bewilderingly selfish, paranoid and self-righteous.

Over time, though, both siblings and parents’ relationship evolved into one of general support and respect, coming to each other’s aid, engaging in great endeavors and providing moral support to one another, even though one or more of them may not always have clearly been on the side of right.

So if the US is the “loud” one, the flashy, big-talking Type A, the stunning over-achiever who makes everyone else in the room feel inadequate (or at least tries to), the one who’s been out in the world reaping fame and glory, constantly striving always to grow his own wealth, power and influence, Canada’s the one that dresses down, doesn’t dominate the conversation at the dinner table, has his mortgage paid off and worries more about just being a good neighbor and minding his own business.

He’s the one who, through patience and consistency, has built himself a very comfortable, stable, relaxed life, and people generally find his company enjoyable. Others generally have mixed feelings towards Older Brother, being sometimes jealous of him, sometimes afraid and very often both. Older Brother wants everyone to be like him and feels the need to justify his choices constantly; Younger Brother’s the one who goes, “No thanks, I’m good, but whatever works for you.”

How I Got Here

I married a Canadian woman, it didn’t work out, and I stayed. I had applied for permanent residence with my wife as my sponsor, which involved paying around $900, submitting a criminal background check and medical examination, filling out a form and waiting seven months. During the interim, I was not allowed to work legally or receive any public services.

Once my application passed, I received my “landing papers”, a SIN (Social Insurance Number or Canadian SSN) and was then eligible to live permanently, work and receive health care. My status lasts 5 years between renewals, during which I must spend a minimum of 2 years on Canadian soil or abroad as an employee for a Canadian company. I cannot vote or serve in the military.

If I had applied for public assistance (welfare, etc) during my first 3 years, my sponsor (ex-wife) would have been responsible for paying it back to the government. I can and have received unemployment insurance.

What It’s Like To Be a Working Guy in Canada

I have no college degree and am actually a high-school dropout, though I’ve always lied about it, and it’s never been questioned (fortunately, they didn’t check on that in my residency application). I live in Alberta now, so I don’t pay provincial income tax.

Regardless, when I was in Nova Scotia, I still took home more of my wages than I did in California, despite paying both federal and provincial income tax. Canadian tax rates are lower for lower incomes, higher for higher incomes. If I were to make 100 grand a year, yes, I’d pay a higher tax rate, but I don’t.

The Canadian and US Dollars hover around parity for the most part, so for all intents and purposes, a buck is a buck. My cost of living is about the same as in the US. Rents are comparable and so are utilities.

Food can be more expensive, and smokes are over 10 bucks a pack for most brands in Alberta and more in some other places; the more liberal, the more expensive – same with booze. Gas is currently about $CN 1.12/liter., ($4.20/gallon.) in Alberta, which has the lowest gas prices in the country, naturally. It’s as much as $CN .50 more a liter in other places.

Canada has a federal sales tax of 5% known as the General Sales Tax (GST). Each province can add to that their own sales tax, the combined sales taxes being called a Harmonised Sales tax (HST). This can vary widely from province to province depending on their social leanings and economy.

Nova Scotia, being a notoriously liberal and socially-conscious province with higher unemployment than the national average, has a HST of 15%; the idea is that when more people are unemployed, social services and support become even more critical to maintaining quality of life.

Alberta, which is shoveling in oil revenues like there’s no tomorrow and has a thriving agricultural industry (grain and cattle) is probably the least socially-conscious of all the provinces, being somewhat the Canadian version of Texas. It has no HST, only the 5% GST.

So, in short, I’ve sort of made a deal with the devil by coming out here for work after having been laid off in Nova Scotia; I enjoy the economic benefits, but am slightly at odds with the social climate which is, to be fair, still more liberal than that of the US as a whole.

Here’s an example of the difference between the IRS and Revenue Canada: I get a check every 3 months for $CN 100 as a GST rebate because I make below a certain income level (I gross between  $CN 38k-45k/year). When was the last time you ever got anything from the IRS aside from something terrifying telling you you’re fucked?

Summary: Being an average, middle-class working person in Canada means you can actually have a good, comfortable life.

Health Care

If you live here, either as a citizen, on a visa or as a permanent resident, like myself, you get health care. Each province administers its own system, and it comes out of the tax base; there is no premium deduction from your pay, no check box on your tax return form. I hear Alberta (surprise, surprise) used to have a mandatory premium deducted from your tax return each year, but not any more.

Your provincial health card will get you care no matter where in the country you are. Emergency room, ambulances – no charge to the insured. Neither dental nor optometry are covered, and seeing a specialist requires a referral. My employers provide me with health insurance for things like optometry, dental, chiro, prescription plan, etc, as does everyone else’s, to my knowledge.

But if you’re a small business, one less burden of responsibility and concern has been removed. Even if you’re a cheap, mean bastard who cuts corners every chance he gets, you and your employees are still covered.

Here’s how my Canadian doctor visits have gone:

Scenario 1

Receptionist: Hello, dear, have you been here before?
Me: No.
Receptionist: Can I see your card, dear? (I hand her the card). Is this your current address?
Me: Yes.
Receptionist: OK, here’s your card back, have a seat and someone will call your name in a couple minutes.
10 minutes later: Mr. **********?

Scenario 2

Receptionist: Hello, dear, have you been here before?
Me: Yes.
Receptionist: Your name?
Me: **********
Receptionist: Is this your current address?
Me: Yes.
Receptionist: OK, have a seat and someone will call your name in a couple minutes.
10 minutes later: Mr. **********?

This is not a fantasy; I am not exaggerating. No co-pay, no multi-page forms to fill out, no pissed off, fat, black bitch in teddy-bear scrubs studiously ignoring me as I wait for her attention, all-but-daring me to interrupt her personal phone call by meekly saying “Excuse me”, no interminable wait, nothing.

Now, I’m sure a clinic in a huge city like Toronto or Vancouver would probably be much busier (though nothing like the Cinco de Mayo fiestas of Southern California, I’m sure) and its staff more unpleasant (my experiences are limited to Halifax and my small Southern Alberta town of 2,000), but seriously, anyone who can compare this with an HMO experience in the US and see no difference is an abject boob.

My ex-wife was diagnosed with thyroid cancer when she was 20. She had surgery, was treated, recovered fully and takes thyroid medication. Aside from the cost of the prescription, which was about 12 bucks a refill, her cost was zero. She had merely to show her Nova Scotia Health Card and her life was saved without any worries that she would face any complications when it came to receiving care or paying for it afterwards.

Summary: It is not a myth – the Canadian health care system works and it works very well. For everyone.

Politics

Quick primer on the parliamentary system:

Political parties elect a leader. General elections are for MP’s (Members of Parliament), the equivalent of House representatives in the US. Whoever gets the most MP’s in Parliament is the Majority – their leader becomes Prime Minister. You do not elect a Prime Minister, you elect a Party with whom you agree. As long as that party is in the majority, their leader is Prime Minister.

There is a Canadian Senate as well, but Senators are appointed by the Prime Minister – not elected – so they are all, inevitably, of the same party as the Majority (I’m sure there are a couple exceptions, but for the most part, who’s going to pick a guy from the Opposition?). I’m not clear what the Senate does, but I know that the lawmaking process is not bicameral.

The Majority party is the Progressive Conservatives (PC), colloquially known by the traditional English term “Tories”.

The Opposition are the Liberal Party (which held power for quite some time but has diminished in recent years due to lack of leadership), the New Democrats (which are the largest minority and surged suddenly in ranks at the last general election), the Green Party (a handful) and I think Bloc Quebecois still has a couple MP’s.

Bloc Quebecois is essentially an ethnocentric provincial party whose only real platform has been the secession of Quebec, and their place in national politics has been the subject of some contention; they have been, however, utterly decimated, many of their seats lost to the burgeoning ND Party in the last election.

There may be some stragglers from all-but-defunct other parties with a seat here or there, but I’m not sure and nor would be your average Canadian.

A Canadian Conservative is a lot closer to a US Democrat than it is to a US Republican. They are not trying to repeal universal health care, abortion rights, gay marriage or any of the other causes celebres of their Bizarro-World US counterparts. They object to things like making trans-gender public restrooms mandatory and legalizing pot and support things like privatizing government entities and easing up on business regulation, etc., for the most part.

Yes, PM Harper and his crew are trying to emulate some US Republican fashion trends, for example a “3-strikes, tough-on-crime” bill and building more prisons, but everybody’s response to that is generally, “Why? The crime rate is actually dropping.” Thanks to the Canadian Parliamentary system though, the MP’s are really not much more than what they should be, which is bureaucrats put in charge of keeping shit running smoothly, sanely and reliably.

Canadian politicians are also by-and-large not millionaires and lawyers as they are in the US. They come from a pretty wide demographic (a recently-elected ND MP from Quebec is actually a female bartender).

At the provincial level, Canada has Premiers instead of Governors (It always reminds me of some Communist Eastern European country when I hear that term – still doesn’t sound right to me). They attain office the same way as national PM’s: Parties field candidates as reps for the various provincial “ridings“, and the Party with the majority’s leader becomes Premier.

In Alberta, the Tories have maintained a hegemony over provincial politics for the last 40 years (PM Stephen Harper is an Albertan).

The current Premier, Allison Redford, was a constitutional attorney, a field of expertise rather uncommon amongst US Republican politicians, but not among Democratic Presidents it would seem.

Provinces sometimes have provincial political parties, limited to provincial politics, though Quebec’s Bloc Quebecois made its way into Parliament, concerned as they are with Quebec’s secession, though their position and influence in federal politics is marginal to say the least.

Alberta‘s further-right party, the Wild Rose Party, went balls-out during the last provincial election, and their gaffes were many and hilarious; one of their candidates mentioned in a mass emailing something about gays being “condemned to a lake of fire,” and another quipped that he would win his riding easily as he was the “only white guy“ on the ballot.

In true neocon fashion, the party responded not by asking either of the doddering farts to step down, but by making the statement that “there are many differing views within the Wild Rose Party, and all are tolerated.” Needless to say, they got their asses handed to them instead of winning a majority.

In Alberta, the Tories have been making noises about privatizing Alberta Health, giving the usual bullshit arguments about how the “private sector can deliver services more efficiently and cost-effectively than the provincial government can,” etc., but it’s not a position that seems to be gaining much traction with the electorate…..

To put it simply, Canadians are generally not stupid; they see what works with their own eyes, thus they are far less susceptible to specious arguments, panic-mongering and outright bullshit than their US counterparts. They know when something is working and aren’t obsessed with change for its own sake, not even Albertans.

Summary: Politics in Canada actually has more to do with working for the people than it does furthering ideological agendas or political careers.

Immigration and Race

Per the most recent census statistics, Canada is comprised of 80% Whites, 16.2% visible minorities and 3.8% Aboriginals.

One of the things I truly love about Canada is that there aren’t Mexicans all over the place. There are no undocumented aliens per se, since not only is Canada not conveniently within walking distance of Mexico, but an illegal alien isn’t able to get work or free medical care here. There are no mobs of day laborers in the Home Depot parking lot, nor have I seen massive, ethnically-homogenous ghettos in which an illegal can live and receive community support with impunity.

This may not be the case in the bigger cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, but the numbers of illegals must be so low as not to have much effect as a socioeconomic issue. Illegals aside, I don’t see Canada suffering the negative social and cultural impact of being overwhelmed by immigrants from one particular culture.

Canada has a policy of basing immigration approval upon needed skills. Since Canada is not suffering from a shortage of gardeners, pool cleaners or sidewalk ice-cream vendors, that would pretty much exclude the bulk of the Mexicans wanting to come in.

Canada has a foreign temporary worker program just like the US used to since there’s more work here than there are people who want to do it. A Newfoundland seafood processing plant that had shut down for awhile opened back up when the catches improved and couldn’t find enough locals for the jobs, so they imported a bunch of Thais along with an interpreter.

However, in most other circumstances, immigrants have to prove a functioning grasp of either English or French depending where they‘re going to be working and living. Children who cannot speak English are sent home by public schools, and the parents are informed that the school will be happy to teach their child once the parents have taught the child English.

Recently, the English requirement for citizenship was actually increased. Canada seems to feel, oddly enough, that two of the keys to properly managing immigration are ensuring that an individual not only can speak one of the official languages but that they can somehow contribute to the economy and society as a whole.

Absent giant ethnically-homogenous communities of immigrants, Canadian immigrants seem to assimilate much more quickly and willingly than in the US. Every first-generation-born Canadian I’ve met has no foreign accent; they say “eh”, and they seem to hang out with just about anybody.

I never get the vibe that foreigners and their kids here hate Canadians while enjoying the benefits of being Canadian. The mayor of Calgary, the biggest city in the most conservative province, is a Muslim – Naheed Nenshi – and you’d never know by hearing him speak on the radio. You see “people of color” scattered throughout the media and government, and they all seem to retain ethnic names, despite sounding and acting like Canadians.

Blacks in Canada are not ubiquitous. In Calgary, the Blacks I meet are invariably immigrants; there is no “Black” part of town.

In Halifax, which was, among other things, at the other end of the Underground Railroad, the Black population is mostly descended from former American slaves and is proportionally larger than in many other areas of the country.

This population in Halifax began in earnest following the War of 1812 during which “Black loyalists” (slaves willing to fight their masters in exchange for freedom) were deeded land on the outskirts of Halifax as reward for helping the Crown, which was named Africville.

Africville has a tragic and disappointing history which I’m going to expand upon in a separate piece, but suffice it to say that Blacks in Nova Scotia suffer from many of the same socioeconomic problems as do their counterparts in the US, though certainly not to the same degree.

I understand that there are Black communities in and around Toronto which are primarily Caribbean in origin, that there is public housing inhabited mostly by Blacks and that crime rates are higher in these areas, but I’m not aware of specifics.

I have never heard a Canadian say “nigger”. Oh, I’ve had friends say “What up, my nigga,” plenty of times, but as far as it being used as a pejorative, never. Much of what many Canadians believe about Blacks, since many of them have never spent much time around or lived around them, they get from US TV shows, so many of them are understandably scared shitless.

In Nova Scotia, where there is a Black population descended from American slaves and not immigrants, I often heard the general stereotypes bandied about by Whites: They don’t like to work, but they do like to commit crimes, do drugs, get bitches pregnant and split, etc.

My ex-wife was utterly petrified of them. She saw a Black kid walk down our street once and, since no Black people lived on our street, wanted to call the police, I shit you not. She did not, though, and the ensuing argument lasted about two hours.

Canadians are, however, very quick to characterize Americans as racists, despite the fact that Canada had Jim Crow “Whites only” bylaws in rural areas just like the US did. But, in fairness, the institution of slavery did not exist here, and that counts for rather a bit.

Aboriginals, still commonly referred to as Indians, seem to take the place, in many ways, that Blacks do in US society. They are disproportionately plagued by crime, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction and prejudice and are distributed across Canada. They receive government assistance and are spoken of by most of the Whites I know as a “problem” and with little compassion. A disproportionate number of their males are in the prison system.

They are, in effect, the Blacks of Canada, and the origins of their problems are as convoluted and difficult to figure out as are those of US Blacks. However, to be real, they were doing OK before Whitey showed up.

The French

As you may or may not know, the English defeated the French in the battle for supremacy in Canada but allowed the French to stay and maintain their own culture. Like any defeated people, despite the magnanimity of the victors, a lot of them are still sore about it.

As I’ve mentioned before, there are elements within Quebecois society who believe that Quebec should exist as its own separate country. Anglo Canadians love to point out that the federal government paid for and built their infrastructure, so if they want to pay back all of that, fine, go ahead; many Anglos are constantly irritated and annoyed by the French.

Despite this, however, Quebec and its French culture are clearly things that make Canada, well, Canadian and add an extremely cool flavor to the whole mix here. In 1980, Quebec held a referendum about whether it should secede from the Canadian federal government or stay.

Literally thousands of people from all over Canada came to Quebec to plead with the citizens to remain part of Canada. I’ve heard the old radio news reports from that time, and people were actually crying, “Please don’t leave.” Many Quebecois were also crying, saying, “How can we consider this? What does it say to the rest of the world?”. Fortunately, the results were 60-40 against.

I can’t help but imagine that if Texas tried to do the same thing, millions of Americans would show up saying, “Please! Do it! Leave and good riddance!” OK I was being a smart-ass with that one, but I think you’ll understand my point. Canadians seem to like other Canadians more than most Americans like other Americans, even when they’re French.

Summary: Canada is very White, its culture is Western European, and the people who emigrate to it seem to acknowledge and appreciate that, as such, it is a much better place to live than wherever they came from. Canada is a clear example of the superiority of Western Culture and the benefits of White Rule.

Religion

Yes, we have it here. I see churches all over the place, especially in Alberta, which I believe boasts more churches per capita than any other province (once again, proof that Alberta secretly wishes it was the 51st State of the US).

However, there is much less “religion” here. It is not part of the political conversation and seems rarely, if ever, to be part of polite conversation. Alberta is the province which boasts the most Evangelicals, and it’s the only one where I’ve seen occasional billboards in rural areas featuring Right-To-Life slogans.

However, when I tried to call the 800 number on one to tell them to suck my dick, the number was disconnected, and the website on the sign no longer existed; that’s the degree of religious fervor out here. In Nova Scotia, I did see an anti-abortion protest outside of a hospital: Two old ladies in camp chairs watching a portable TV on an ice chest, their picket signs leaning against the fence behind them as people walked by in both directions.

Summary: In Canada, religion is essentially no one’s business but their own, so shut the fuck up, and please don’t block the sidewalk.

Guns, Crime and Violence

Guns are not banned in Canada; they are regulated and controlled. Allow me to slack off for a second and quote a Wikipedia article for a brief historical background:

Registration of firearms in Canada has been an issue since the 1930s when the registration of handguns became mandatory. Over the past few decades, legislation had become increasingly restrictive for firearm owners and from 1995 until 2012, all firearms were required to be registered. As of April 6, 2012 the registration of non-restricted firearms is no longer required in any province or territory, except for Quebec, pending litigation.

Systematic auditing and criminalization of firearm owners and sports is implemented and enforced in most of Central Canada, and to a lesser extent, in Western Canada (in most cases firearm ownership regulations vary slightly in different provinces and territories, where some provinces have decided to mandate their own laws, such as the Quebec Law 9 course, which is mandatory for all owners of restricted firearms).

The Criminal Code of Canada provides recognition of self-defense with a firearm; The Firearms Act provides a legal framework wherein an individual may, acquire/possess and carry, a restricted or (a specific class of) prohibited firearm for protection from other individuals when police protection is deemed insufficient.

This situation is extremely rare, as evidenced by the fact that the (publicly available version of the) RCMP Authorization To Carry application refers only to protection of life during employment that involves handling of valuable goods or dangerous wildlife.

In short, you can have a gun if you have a good reason for it. “Personal protection” and just being afraid the government is going to show up and shove you in a FEMA trailer for re-education are not considered valid reasons. It is a matter of record that Canada’s rates of homicides and suicides using guns have further decreased as more and more restrictions have been put into place.

This has not eliminated crime, but it has clearly mitigated it. I’d rather have a guy come at me with a knife than a gun even if I’m similarly armed any day – I don’t know about you. To anyone in the US who maintains that lower violent crime can be achieved through an “armed society”, you need only look to Canada to see how absolutely shit-brained-stupid that is.

Canada has crime though. People get their cars stolen, there are rapes, there is drunk driving – all the usual. Canada even boasts some celebrated serial killers as well. Most Canadians do lock their doors when they leave for work and when they go to bed, despite what Michael Moore might want you to believe.

The difference between Canada and the US in this regard is the crime per capita. In a city as big as Calgary (approximately 1.4 million), which is about 30 minutes from me, the amount of crime compared to a similar-sized US city is ridiculously lower. There isn’t even as much trash on the ground. I’m not kidding – same goes for the rest of what I’ve seen of Canada.

What doesn’t exist are gangs to any great degree. In Vancouver you have some Asian gang stuff, some minor shit with Russians and some others in Toronto and Quebec, but nothing even close to what you have in the US.

Another thing I’ve noticed is the role of the “career criminal”.

In the US, being a criminal is an actual occupation for many, one which they pursue with great professionalism and acumen.

In Canada, most of the criminals I’ve seen and read about are basically stupid assholes. They steal some shit, maybe sell some drugs, and they get caught.

This one idiot drug dealer in Halifax lived in a trailer park, yet bought a bright yellow Hummer and parked it out front. After a few stray bullets zipped through his neighbors‘ homes courtesy of a rival “drug kingpin “ (yes, this is how the local news referred to him), the cops pretty much figured out that if they nabbed the guy in the yellow Hummer at the bridge toll-plaza, they’d get some answers.

Random acts of violence occur. Guys get dumped and kill their ex and her new boyfriend; a middle-aged loser who’s sponging off his grandmother’s pension checks decides he can smother her with a pillow and pretend she’s still alive; some guy hears Satan tell him he can fuck Avril Lavigne if he kills his whole family in their sleep, and so on.

But to be honest, most random, violent crimes I hear about around my neck of the woods, few as they are, involve immigrants. You can take the boy out of Viet Nam, but if you smile at his girlfriend during lunch time at the meat processing plant, he just might shove a fork in your neck.

The cops here are actually nice, at least the ones I’ve met. You’ve got your Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP’s), which function as the equivalent of the FBI and State police in provinces without a provincial police force (unlike Ontario or Newfoundland), the city police forces and the “peace officers” who enforce by-laws and do not carry weapons.

The only times I’ve dealt with cops, whether local or RCMP, they have said, “Hey, how’s it going,” introduced themselves and shook my hand, then calmly figured out what was going on. No twitchy hyper-vigilance, no hand on the gun as they approached. I’m guessing they may be a little different in the metropolii, but still, you don’t get Rodney King situations here.

If called to a bar in response to a complaint of a disturbance, a Canadian cop is more likely to say, “Hey, I think your friend’s a little drunk, why don’t you take him home?” as opposed to calling in six cars for backup and making the entire place lie face down with their hands behind their heads.

There are occasional stories of abuse, and there was a spate of deaths caused by tasering, but generally, since everyone doesn’t automatically hate them and want them dead, I think the cops are a bit more relaxed and less concerned with being intimidating. They are, after all, just guys trying to do their jobs, and I get that most Canadians understand and appreciate that.

Despite the fact that they seem less violent as a culture, do not make the mistake of thinking Canadians are pussies. Canadians drink, and they also fight. Hockey, the world’s most violent sport is, after all, a Canadian invention.

The difference, though, is the absence of ubiquitous and constant belligerence. If I go to a crowded concert or sporting event in the US, it’s a safe bet there will be more than one fight. My ex-roommate’s best friend from Northern California was jumped and had his brains beaten after a Dodgers-Giants game in LA; it put him in a coma, and he’s barely escaped being a vegetable.

It would be impossible to me to conceive of that happening here and actually is impossible to any Canadians I’ve spoken with about it. Can Canadians hold their liquor better, or are they just generally less angry, violent and belligerent? Maybe a little of the former and a lot of the latter.

Summary: Less guns, garbage, crime and violence, nicer cops, fewer incarcerated citizens and far less anxiety as a whole.

Weed

I smoke a lot of weed. I have been doing so for over 35 years. In Canada, medical marijuana is federally legal, but I can’t just go to a podiatrist and tell him I’ve been having trouble sleeping to get a license like in California. It requires multiple signed applications by several doctors and, like the gun licensing, the determining criterion is, “Why do you need it?”. Unfortunately, mild insomnia isn’t considered a valid reason.

Things like rheumatoid arthritis, cancer and serious medical conditions which require pain management are generally what are required. Once licensed, it means you can go anywhere in the country without getting hassled; you can even walk through an airport with a sack in your pocket, provided you have your license on you. You cannot, of course, burn one in public (legally). You can also grow some.

Despite the fact that I must, then, smoke weed illegally, there are a couple of benefits to doing so in Canada. First and foremost is that I can get a half ounce of good smoke for 120 bucks. Second is that the general attitude towards marijuana law enforcement is pretty relaxed. In most metropolitan areas, it is considered of “lowest priority,” officially, when it comes to enforcing pot laws.

In Vancouver, there are Amsterdam-style cafes where everyone’s smoking weed, and the cops leave them alone. In the case of illegal grow-ops, though, or significant trafficking, the cops, understandably, do not look the other way. But as far as normal people getting high and not causing any problems, the worst they usually do is take it away from you, tell you to “watch it”, and maybe smoke it themselves after work.

For the record though, Harper and the Tories have stated unequivocally that marijuana will not become legal as long as they are the majority. Fuck the Tories.

Summary: Canada’s a cool place if you smoke weed; just remember it’s still illegal (technically).

Civil Liberties

Gays can marry here – it’s been legal for quite some time – and, despite that fact, they are not running around having anal sex in the streets. Pre-employment and random drug screenings are forbidden as unconstitutional, yet people aren’t snorting coke at work or showing up baked to the gills.

Women can get abortions, and their health care covers it, yet there is not an epidemic of female promiscuity (much as I wish there were). Prostitution is, by certain definitions in certain areas, basically legal, or at least not criminal. Even the age of consent is much lower in some provinces, yet teenaged girls are not being incessantly fucked to death and discarded by middle-aged men.

The guiding principle behind Canada’s attitude towards civil liberties seems to be, “If they’re not hurting anyone or causing a fuss, leave them the fuck alone, it’s none of your business.” Pierre Trudeau wisely stated that the government has “no place in our bedrooms, period,” and he was agreed with by even the most right-wing politicians at the time, eventually.

I laugh my ass off every time I hear some Republican or Libertarian troll threaten to “move to Canada” if Obama gets re-elected. Not only would they not be issued a visa for such reasons, if they were, they would be forced to live in a place where fags can teach their kids, sluts can get abortions, niggers can get decent jobs, hippies can smoke weed and people claiming God speaks to them are not only banned from public office but they’re quite often placed under psychiatric observation.

Summary: I think my freedoms are more well-protected here than in the US.

Language

Canadians do not say aboot. Most commonly, the ow diphthong, which is broken down into the phonemes a (like cat) + oo in US English (and every English dictionary), is very often pronounced eh-oo in Canada, similar to how the Irish pronounce it.

In Atlantic Canada, it is common to hear the diphthong pronounced oh (I had a boss who actually spelled couch as coach because that’s how he pronounced it). They also usually pronounce sorry as soar-ee, been as bean, produce (n.) as prah-duce, project as proh-ject, process as proh-cess, schedule as shed-jule, missile as miss-isle and a slew of other British pronunciations.

What drives me nuts though is their insistence on pronouncing virtually any a they see as the short a in cat. It’s difficult for me to represent graphically, but go ahead and say to yourself the following words with that short a and see how lame it sounds: pAsta, tsunAmi, drAma, mAzda. Ugh. Sonically, it makes me fucking cringe.

And I know it’s a matter of taste, but to me, mispronouncing names and proper nouns from other languages in that fashion just seems ignorant. I guess that’s a vestige of the famous British contempt for other cultures giving a last, dying twitch.

I have adopted the Canadian forms of spelling; I think it’s cool. They use the British forms here almost exclusively: colour, centre, defence, and so on. They do not use the spelling aluminium. They do, however, use the silent h in herb.

But while Canadian spelling I may have adopted, most of Canadian pronunciation I have not. The exception is when I play “I’m pretending to be Canadian.” I have at various times when doing this been pegged as a Maritimer (someone from Atlantic Canada), since I have a good grasp of the accent and “isms“ I absorbed while in Nova Scotia.

Though I am functional in French, I rarely have occasion to use it. Canadian French, though, is far more dissimilar to its parent than Canadian English, and volumes could be written about Francophone (French-speaking) culture in Canada, and I haven’t enough experience to do so with any credibility or thoroughness.

Summary: Someone could drop you in the middle of any major Canadian city outside of Quebec in your sleep, and it’d take you a bit to realize, just hearing people speak, that you weren’t in the US.

Civility

This is, to me, the single most important difference between Americans and Canadians, and I believe this trait informs all the positive ones I’ve previously outlined. Canadians are civil. They are brought up holding doors for other people, apologizing if they think they’ve offended or been a nuisance and just in general trying to be kind and decent to everyone else, even if they don’t like them.

The concept that your negative personal feelings towards others should not inform your actions towards them, that it’s right and beneficial to society to be polite to everyone regardless of whether you hate their guts or not is so obvious to them that it doesn’t bear mentioning.

Canadians’ default mode is “nice”. When in doubt, just be nice. Don’t understand something? Be nice and ask what someone meant, don’t just immediately go “Oh, yeah? FUCK YOU!” and start swinging if you aren’t sure whether you’ve been insulted or not.

Canadians don’t automatically assume the worst motive for the actions of others. If a guy’s going off and making a fuss about something, the first thought is usually, “Wow, he must really be having a bad day.” One of the keys to civility is cutting each other some slack, being easy on each other, at least the first couple times.

Canadians seem much better at this “a mile in my neighbor’s moccasins” philosophy than most Americans. They’ve been inculcated with good behavior through example; they don’t even think about it. As a result, even the immigrants get in on it within a generation.

Of course, there are those who recognize this tendency towards civility and understanding and try to subvert it for their own purposes. These types will invariably either adopt a disingenuously oblivious mien (“Oh, did I cut in front of you? Gee, didn’t see the end of the line.”) or will behave blatantly aggressively in the hopes of causing others to back down and avoid any type of confrontation, something that seems bred into most Canadians from birth.

I am at times frustrated by what I sometimes perceive as a pathological need to avoid confrontation of any kind. I see people allow others to take advantage of and inconvenience them without saying anything, and it pisses me off.

Some ass-wipe the other day at a movie theater, in which one joins a single line while waiting for the next available cashier, was standing near a particular window which looked as if it would free-up next, clearly intending to head straight for it while avoiding the line.

I, of course, ever-vigilant to such things and being a self-appointed Guardian of Civilization and Warrior against the Americanization of Canada, moved forward immediately when the register became available, shoving in front of the asshole and saying, “I was here first. The line’s over there.”

He muttered something under his breath as he walked to the line. Coincidentally, he was quite swarthy and spoke with a thick Middle-Eastern accent. Fuckers who style themselves “wolves among sheep” in this country fill me with cold rage. Despite the fact that your average Canadian finds my attitude and actions inappropriate, I will gladly suffer their disapproval, kinda like Batman has to.

Canadians are also far more respectful, in general, of people’s privacy. I hear less gossip and less mean shit behind people’s backs than I did in the States. People don’t pry as much, they aren’t as obsessed with going through your laundry, and are far less likely to share something private they may have learned about you.

For example, I was a porn actor in the US for a time; I got some press, and my stuff shows up on cable every now and then (gotta love Canadian cable; when they show porn, they leave in the penetration), so I am infrequently recognized.

A guy I worked with, when I confessed about my former occupation after having known him a few months, told me he already knew. When I asked why he didn’t tell me he knew his response was that if I’d wanted him to know, I would have told him, and it was none of his business.

In a similar situation in the US, a guy I worked with was so excited to know that he told everybody I worked with, including my bosses, and from then on, every time I spoke with them, though they never let on they knew, there was this weird awkwardness, like they couldn’t look at me without seeing me naked.

On the flipside, an Iranian immigrant kid I was in training with at this call center in Halifax sat down next to me one day, grinning. “Hey, hey, do you have tattoo? Show me”.

I lifted my sleeve and showed him, and he all-but shouted “Ha! I knew it! I see you, I see you on TV!” I convinced him to keep his mouth shut, but I’d catch the weird little fucker staring and grinning at me from across the room fairly often, and he’d give me the thumbs-up if I looked up at him.

Summary: The more civil you are, the better everyone gets along and the better your civilization.

In Closing

A banking system under control, sane gun laws, lower crime, universal health care, a thriving middle class, no illegal immigration problem, cheap weed, way less garbage all over the place, fewer assholes per capita, a strong federal government with excellent social programs…isn’t this sorta what Obama’s America would look like?

Can’t Make It Without Immigrant Scabs? Just Go!

Repost from the old site.

We hear over and over again about all these businesses that supposedly are going to go out business if they can’t hire immigrant scabs. And that’s what every single illegal alien is in this country – a scab. Let’s make that loud and clear here.

And H-1B “non-immigrant guest workers” that have totally destroyed the computer industry for US engineers and programmers are nothing but scabs too. Indian nationalists tell me that without H-1B’s, all US computer corporations will have to go out of business. Well, first of all, that is complete nonsense. It’s not going to happen.

This is all based on the premise that there is such horrible competition from those great computer corporations in INDIA that are, you know, going to put Microsoft and Intel out of business.

I’ve also heard it from a fish processing plant in New England that now hires all illegal aliens. Back in the 1980′s, this was a union shop paying high wages. Bottom line is they broke the union. Now they pay crap wages and the only people dumb or desperate enough to work there are illegals. I suppose they are treated just wonderfully too.

So they need to hire illegals. As always, Americans will do the horrible, smelly and dirty work, but you need to pay them a good wage. This is what happened to our meat packing plants too, exactly. This is also what happened to the US construction industry. One by one, they broke the constructions unions.

In the 1970′s and 1980′s, my friends were working union construction. It paid good money, enough to buy a home and raise a family. That’s all pretty much gone now. The jobs that once paid the equivalent of $30-45/hour in today’s wages are mostly history. There are still union jobs around, but not that many, and they have to wage continuous war against illegals.

There’s also a serious problem with legal immigrants from Mesoamerica who we have insanely allowed to flood in here. The result has been a complete glut in unskilled labor, such that many legal Mesoamericans are happy to work construction for $10/hr.

These jobs used to pay $30-45/hr. One would think that with a 30-75% decline in the cost of labor, even including inflation, that the cost of a house would have gone down. Forget it. Instead, we have seen insane increases in inequality and lopsided returns for those at the top of the heap.

I blame the Left in part for all of this. For the destruction of the US middle class and working class, for the crime and gang wave among young Americans in our cities (all the unskilled work goes to illegals, so young men turn to crime, gangs and dope).

For the mad increases in inequality, for the decline in wages for US workers, for workers have to work two and three jobs to get by, for the entire rightwing and Republican revolution (created in part by the empowerment of a 20% upper to upper middle class that benefited tremendously by massive wealth redistribution), for the ruination of US unions.

There were many factors at play in the development of these sorry reactionary and backwards trends over 35 years, but the US Idiot Left cheering on mass legal and illegal immigration into the US, especially in the past 20 years, has played its own sorry and significant role.

The American worker doesn’t really have any friends anymore. Both parties are supporting his total and absolute replacement by a never-ending tidal wave of immigrant scabs.

There have been some posts lately about a particularly gratuitous, outrageous and in your face abuse of immigration law in a town called Postville, Iowa in a plant that was managed by Orthodox Jews.

They came into Postville, took over the plant, got rid of all the Americans, and hired all illegal aliens. They are now polluting the water supply. I doubt they have paid much taxes either. Apparently they were also allowing the plant to be used to manufacture methamphetamine! How low can you go?

This incident has been written up a lot, including a book by a Jewish author that was quite critical of these Orthodox Jews – Steven Bloom – Postville – A Clash of Cultures in the Heartland. They came into the town, would not talk to or be friendly with anyone not Jewish, filled the town with illegal Mesoamericans, and basically created a lot of havoc.

This particular Jewish family – the Rubashkins – have been crooks for a very long time. They’ve been not only ripping off the Gentiles in the traditional Orthodox manner, but they have also specialized in ripping off their own people. That’s actually a violation of Jewish dual morality, and it may explain why they got some fellow Jews after them.

The Jewish press, as usual, wrote glowing articles about this wonderful situation in this small Iowa town, and Jewish Hollywood made a stupid documentary narrated by Glen Close and sponsored by Hallmark that lied and said how wonderful everything was in Postville, Iowa.

Here is Steve Sailer’s excellent article on this situation. The comments are also enlightening. There is a Jewish commenter (apparently) on there defending the Lubavitchers running the slaughterhouse (the Lubavitchers are the very worst of all ultra-Orthodox Jews). His line is that if they shut down the plant, it will be an economic disaster for Postville.

I get to the point of my post.

So shut it down already! Seriously, just shut down the fucking plant. They aren’t hiring any Americans anyway. Just move it to Mexico and take the 800 Mexican scabs with you.

That’s basically my response to all these idiots who say we need to bring in Indian H-1B job thief scabs and illegals to do all this work that supposedly Americans just won’t do. Supposedly it’s going to harm US business too much to get rid of all the immigrant scabs, legal and illegal.

Look man, if you can’t make it paying American workers the wages that they want (not too high, actually) just take the fuck off. Go overseas. Offshore. Move your damn business to a foreign country. What good is a business in the US that isn’t even hiring Americans anyway?

Who’s making money off that, besides the criminal owner? A bunch of immigrant scabs, that’s who. And they are worthless. They add nothing to this country, they and their jobs can go in a NY minute without a tear to be shed. These businesses are nothing but parasites in our country. If all a business can do in our country is just be a parasite, then just move your damn operation offshore and get the Hell out of the country.

Pat Buchanon As a Covert White Nationalist

A commenter writes:

Pat Buchanan also seems to be a White Nationalist, or at least someone who believes the US should remain a majority White country forever and uses his “Western Civilization” term as a code for White domination constantly. I’m sure his covert White Nationalism (Which I guess is Nixon era moderate ideology isn’t it?) is what got him kicked off liberal MSNBC.

Most Black, Latino, Amerindian etc racists by definition are on the Left, aren’t they?

Yes Buchanan is a covert White nationalist in a sense. Buchanan is about as far as any form of WN, no matter how mild, has made it in the mainstream. There is little stomach for even Buchanan’s very mild race realism and White ethnocentrism which is why he is being thrown off venue after venue.

Buchanan has few other peers in the mass media, as there is almost no space there for them. Actually, aside from his antisemitism (itself quite mild), Buchanan’s views are quite mild in terms of WN and HBD in general. He’s pretty much saying what a lot of us liberals think but are too frightened to say.

But almost all true White nationalists want to split off and form their own state. Few WN’s want to just keep the US a White majority country anymore, as that seems to be hopeless anyway. The definition of WN anymore seems to be one who wants a separate White country.

Most WN’s nowadays are split into a few camps:

1. Take back the US by force. Enforce White dominance at the state level and throw out the minorities and send them back to wherever. With the most extreme, this would involve some level of genocide or mass murder against non-Whites and “White traitors,” especially Jews and White race traitors.

2. White separatists. Most WN’s nowadays are White Separatists. They want a separate White state in the US along with separate states for Blacks and Hispanics or possibly a separate mixed race state where anyone could live. This has always been the goal of almost all of the major WN figures. Those who deny this are basically lying. WN for all intents and purposes is White separatism in one form or another.

3. The apartheid crowd. Some want to take back the US, enforce White dominance, but not throw out the minorities. This is a lesser trend. They want to keep the minorities under heel with some form of apartheid or Jim Crow. At the very least, they want to get rid of all anti-discrimination laws.

4. Get rid of all anti-discrimination laws. This is the least toxic of the trends, and it’s the fallback position in the even that there is no White state and no White capture of the state and enforced apartheid. All WN’s and I do mean all of them believe that we should eliminate all anti-discrimination laws. Then White towns at least could be set up where there would be massive discrimination against nonwhites on a private level.

This ties in very well with the Libertarian position since all Libertarians want to get rid of all anti-discrimination laws. People of color support Libertarianism at their own risk.

5. End all immigration, legal and illegal. Some modify this to say that we should allow immigration by Whites. This is a fallback minimal position. Obviously this is never going to happen either. We can’t even limit legal immigration. We can’t stop illegal immigration, and there are continuous calls for amnesty. This will never fly, but it’s supported by all WN’s with vehemence. The 1965 Immigration Act was one of the worst things that ever happened to America in their book.

6. End affirmative action. All WN’s support this, and quite a few regular folks do too. This is another fallback minimal position and ties in well with the positions of the Republican Party.

7. Sing the praises of a White majority US and White dominance, bash minorities, but do nothing to keep a White majority or White dominance in place. This is essentially a rhetorical position, and it’s where Pat Buchanan is coming from.

One very smart Black commenter on here wrote a while back that the logical end result of WN could only be genocide, apartheid (or separatism) or expulsion. He was correct of course.

Most Black, Latino, Amerindian etc racists by definition are on the left, aren’t they?

Unfortunately, most Black, Latino and Indian racists are indeed on the Left, often on the Far Left. As there is no space for racism on the Left, this has always bothered me, but on the Left, they say that these folks are not really racists. They’re just fighting back against White racism and only Whites can be racist, bla bla bla.

Time To Junk Internationalism?

Repost from the old site.

Superb commenter James Schipper takes on internationalism and suggests that nationalism is better for workers in this most interesting comment from the comments section of a recent post. My comments follow. I will say that I have a problem with nationalism in general and especially with the sound of the term “national socialism” for obvious reasons. Nationalism leads inevitably to racism, it seems.

But following pure internationalist logic, we are obligated to completely open borders. If you go over to leftwing and liberal pro-immigrant sites and prod them a bit, you often find that they actually do believe in Open Borders for the US.

That would mean that at some point, 1/3 of the world would be here, and 1/2 of Mexico (since 1/3 of the world and 1/2 of Mexico wants to come to the US). I argue that this would be a disaster for this country for many reasons. For one thing, we would become some kind of Calcutta West. For the environment, it would be a complete catastrophe.

At least at the start, unselected immigrants who are not interested in assimilation are only capable of recreating their own society in the new country. So Indians would recreate Calcutta in the US and Mexicans would recreate Mexico City in the US.

An excellent reason to make the immigration process highly rigorous, time-consuming, and difficult with much rejection of potential immigrants who do not make the cut is to insure that those immigrants remaining after the gauntlet-run are dedicated to assimilation.

Unscreened mass immigration, in particular illegal immigration, tends to create masses of immigrants with little interest in assimilating, plus you tend to get countless bad people mixed in with the good.

Many illegal immigrants are actually low-quality immigrants and would be rejected by any sane and rigorous US immigration program. The burden should be on the immigrant to show us precisely how and why they are going to be net positive to our country and not a negative.

Rigorously screened immigrants forced to go through a difficult and trying immigration process would be less likely to recreate Calcutta and Mexico City in the US.

Massive immigration of unskilled laborers is not only bad for ordinary workers, whose wages are driven downward, but also for taxpayers in general. There is no way that an unskilled immigrant can ever pay as much in taxes as he consumes in government services. There are two distributions going on here: upward redistribution of income among natives and transfer of income from natives to immigrants.

Your analysis above is essentially correct because it is based on the obvious premise that the real enemies of workers in high-wage countries are workers in low-wage countries. However, this is in flagrant contradiction with the Marxist idea that there is harmony of interests between all the workers of the world. That Marxist idea is totally false.

In a closed economy, workers and capitalists are like buyers and sellers. The interests of buyers and sellers are not necessarily harmonious but they are complementary and therefore in principle compatible.

Capital without labor is like a truck without a driver and labor without capital is like a transportation worker without a truck. Such a worker can’t transport much. Capital without labor is useless and labor without capital is unproductive.

Under national capitalism, there can be solidarity between workers and capitalists. Under global capitalism there can’t be because capital will use foreign labor as scabs, as you pointed out.

You may not realize it, but you are actually a national socialist in the literal sense of the term. The slogan of national socialism is not “Proletarians of the world, unite”, but “Workers and capitalists of the nation, unite in the interest of the nation”. National socialism does not preach international proletarian brotherhood but national brotherhood.

The Marxist notion of class struggle is pernicious because it makes national solidarity impossible, the only solidarity that can exist. Class struggle should not be fomented but overcome. Divisions can only be overcome by appealing to a higher common interest, and that can only be the nation.

It is only when the capitalists abandon all solidarity with their proletarian compatriots that class struggle becomes necessary, but such struggle should not be waged at a global level because the foreign workers are the allies of the capitalists. Instead of preaching class struggle, the left should appeal to the national sentiments of capitalists.

You and Patrick Buchanan are actually quite close. Your position is also quite similar to the BNP and the German NPD.

Another Marxist idea that is completely false is that workers have no country. It is often capitalists that have no country. Workers are tied to a place and that makes them patriotic. Nobody can have jobs in 20 different countries, but capitalists can easily own businesses in 20 countries.

If there are people without a country, it is global capitalists. A former CEO of the “Dutch” multinational Phillips once said that he wished that the head office of Phillips could be located in the middle of the Atlantic, which goes to show what a loyal Dutchman he was.

Over 80% of the employees of Phillips are now non-Dutch, so to call Phillips a Dutch company simply because most of its owners and top managers are Dutch is to show a capitalist bias. A company does not only consist of owners and managers but also of employees. Calling a company like Phillips Dutch is like saying that SA under apartheid was a white country because whites had most of the wealth and power.

The superiority of national socialism over Marxist socialism was proven in WWII. When Stalin had to motivate the Russians to fight, he didn’t appeal to international proletarian solidarity, which would have been a complete flop, but he appealed to Russian nationalism because genuine nationalism unites while Marxist class struggle only divides.

Socialism can only work at a national level. The Swedish socialist, among the most successful in the world, created a welfare state for Swedes only. It was solidarity that ended at the national border. Now that the Swedish socialists have been infected with political correctness, they are undermining the Swedish welfare state by importing huge numbers of immigrants.

As one Dutch socialist put it, the welfare state is a strictly national arrangement.

The Left has hurt its cause immensely by its hostility to religion and to nationalism. Socialism without nationalism is impotent and nationalism without socialism is fraudulent. A person who claims to be a nationalist but who is a libertarian willing to let poorer members of the nation languish in misery and ignorance is like a man who claims to be a good family man but who never helps less fortunate family members.

Bottom line: there is absolutely nothing progressive about massive immigration of low-skilled to unskilled labor whatsoever. Citizens suffer from cutbacks in government social programs meant to help them.

There is a redistribution of income upwards in the citizenry itself, such that the lower 80% or so of society loses and the upper 20% of so of society gains. IOW, owners and possibly upper management and investors make out big and the workers (generally 80% or so of society) lose money.

In addition to losing money, they also lose services. It is quite possible that they may also see tax hikes to pay for diminishing services. Workers see their wages decline, suffer income losses, lose social services and get tax hikes.

The top 20% of society gets a tremendous amount of increased income, sees dramatic decreases in the wages it must be its workers, and in all probability sees the Gramscian culture of society change in favor of the top 20%, who now increasingly run things and dominate society in general. Why? With the dramatic income shift upwards towards the top 20%, this group will be able to buy the government more and more.

Since government is mostly made up such folks (in Congress and the Executive Branch), they will be delighted by their increased wealth and will continue to direct government policies to continue this redistribution.

The lopsided money shift will also mean that more and more of a nation’s discretionary spending will be done by the top 20%. I believe already they spend at least and possibly way over 50% of all consumer spending. So advertisers direct most of their advertising to this top group, and just ignore the bottom 80%.

This is why when you turn on the TV, you see one advertisement after another directed towards the top 20% of society. This is why when you open up Time Magazine, 90% of the people they interview are in the top 20%, and most of their stories seem to be directed at this group also. It is almost as if the rest of us did not even exist.

I would also like to point out the inevitable: sitting there watching TV and seeing one ad after another directed at the top 20% and realizing that one is a million miles away from that income bracket, many folks will only get resentful and angry and determined to get into that bracket.

Since even if everyone tried to get into the top 20%, 80% would fail, most people are just never going to get there. This increases the dog eat dog mindset, societal atomization and probably even the crime rate.

Liberals and the Left support this!

The H-1Bs’ Criminal Family Line

Repost from the old site.

In a follow-up to my post on the insane and wicked H-1B program, I have discovered that H-1B, like so many criminals, has all sorts of other criminal visas in its polluted family line. All or almost all of these visas are intended for or can be used to the expressed purpose of bringing in cheap foreign labor to displace higher-paid US workers.

The fact that the Democratic Party and the entire US Left has been shamefully silent on this whole matter is sickening. The only protest about H-1B’s and their evil twins is coming from the populist right. Shame on the Left!

To wit:

B-1/B-2: Business and Tourist Visitors (We have already been over this one)

E-1/E-2: Investment Treaty (Foreign Investors)

F-1/M-1: Academic and Vocational Students

H-1B: Specialty Workers and Fashion Models (!!?? We need to import fashion models?!)

TN: NAFTA (Professional workers from Canada and Mexico)

H-1A: Registered Nurses (We do not have enough nurses in America?)

H-2A/H-2B: Temporary Agricultural Workers and other Temporary Laborers

H-3: Temporary Trainees

I: Press and Media Workers (!!??? What the Hell?! We do not have enough journalists in this country?! You must be kidding.)

J-1: Exchange Visitors

L-1: Intra-company Transfers (These visas facilitate offshoring, as do the H-1B visas)

O-1/O-2/O-3: Aliens of Extraordinary Ability in Science, Education, and Business (This one I suppose has some utility, but it is probably used as a cheap labor source like all the rest)

P-1, P-2, P-3: Athletes and Entertainers (What?! WE do not have enough athletes and entertainers in the US?! Are they kidding? Some of this stuff is downright comical.)

Q: International Cultural Exchange Program (Wow, sounds innocuous enough, eh?)

R: Religious Vocation or Occupation (Gads! Bring them in under the umbrella of the churches?!)

In the past 15-20 years, from 1985-1992, ever since the lunatic H-1B program was created, the US government has brought in approximately 17 million foreign workers, the vast majority of whom were brought here for no other reason but to replace existing and more expensive US workers. Since 1992, all indications are that the flood has only increased.

One more thing, if you poison your mind by paying any attention to the US media, you will note that both parties and the entire media are insistent that there is a “need for a guest worker program”. Guess what? We already have one!

Look above. See all those visas? That’s the existing guest worker program in all its shameless glory, flooding this nation with 1 million scabs per year in all-out war against the American worker. Surely with all the nonsense above, we do NOT need another guest worker program?

A couple of very nice tables can be found here, via the essential Job Destruction Directory.

Some Choice: Nazi or PC Nutjob

Repost from the old site.

Boy, the Left has really gotten us into a pickle here, haven’t they?

If you are on the Left, support any degree of socialism, or are even a liberal, you are obligated to go along with the whole PC nutjob package: support for the craziest notions of man-hating Western feminism, for White-hating and non-White-worshipping lunatic anti-racism, for the insanity of mass immigration, not to mention illegal immigration of all things, for the idiotic and suicidal notion of Open Borders.

I talk to regular White people all the time. The Western Left has precisely nothing to do with the realities of how most White human beings in the US live their lives. Most of them hate illegal immigration and want cuts in legal immigration. Most of them dislike mass immigration turning the US into a United Nations on every block. Most of them reject White-hatred and non-White-worship.

And fanatical Western feminism is increasingly trivial to the lives of hundreds of millions of non-Western women who labor under the horrors of misogyny and male supremacy vastly worse than what American women endure.

What I have noticed is that Western feminism seems irrelevant to the realities of how heterosexual males and females negotiate sex and relationships in modern times. It is as if Western feminism is broadcasting from some bizarro alternative universe that has nothing to do with the one most of us negotiate on a daily basis.

What I am trying to say is that the Western PC Left, as its constituted, is irrelevant.

It’s hostile to men and Whites, and double so to White men. Any White man who buys into the line of the Western Left must be out of his mind.

It says right on the sidebar that I’m heterodox. You got it. For one thing, I’m a race realist. There are differences between the races and even within the races in terms of minor races and even ethnic groups. These differences are observable on a wide variety of metrics. It is irrelevant whether these differences are due to genetics or culture, since both intertwine anyway.

To see a particularly nasty view of race realism, shot through naturally all the way with racism, check out this book by Ricard Fuerle, a PhD in Economics and a patent attorney. The book is called Erectus Walks Among Us. The premise of the books is that Black people are monkeys, or apes, or Homo Erectus, or a much more primitive type of man. I’m almost done reading it. It’s pretty entertaining, but I’m warning you, this is toxic stuff.

While most of us don’t even want to think about stuff like this, he does marshal an awful lot of data showing that there are significant differences between the races. Philippe Rushton has done something similar lately and has been raked over the coals for it.

I will say right now that Rushton, Fuerle and the rest may be correct in some of what they say: there are more differences in the races than the obvious ones such as skin color. A quick rejoinder to this argument is typically shot from the Left: that in saying so, we are classifying ethnic groups and races in the same way we classify species and subspecies of animals – as having invariable behavior.

Like most Left rejoinders, this is garbage, but many racists sadly do think this way. I’m not much of an artist, but if I was, I would draw a scatter plot for you. That is what differences, particularly behavioral, psychological, intelligence and other such, but also including athletic ability, would look like between the races if you plotted them out on a graph.

On athletic ability, you would find Blacks more likely to plot superior on certain variables. Some Whites and even Asians would be over with the Blacks. Some Blacks would have very poor athletic ability. Racial and ethnic tendencies are only averages, and there will always be all sorts of individuals who will fall outside the stereotypes for their races.

Unless you understand what a scatter plot looks like, or unless you understand averages and statistics, you can’t discuss racial differences at all.

Why discuss racial differences at all?

Because, for one, the Right keeps throwing them in our faces.

And because the Left’s reaction to any racial or ethnic differences in outcome is wrong. The Left says that all races and ethnic groups are equal, and therefore, any differential outcomes must be the result of racism.

This leads the Left into insane, decades- to centuries-long, never-to-be won wars against racism, sexism, homophobia and whatnot. These things will probably always be with us. The insanity of the Left is the folly that they dream they can eradicate these aspects of human nature.

All you can do is reduce or increase things like that. I am certain that when I die, racism, sexism and homophobia will be alive and well, and the Left will be insanely waging war “to rid them from the Earth”.

Scientifically speaking, it is certainly not true that if one race or ethnic group scores worse than another or does worse on any sort of variable, it must be due to racism. Surely there are all sorts of reasons why this might happen. The folly of the Left is its refusal to consider that there may be things other than racism causing this.

Problem is that almost anyone online taking a race realist position is simply a racist. And almost all such folks are Whites who are arguing at least for getting rid of all civil rights and anti-discrimination legislation and and at most for outright White separatism, apartheid, race war, or ethnic cleansing.

Wow. Breathtaking. You mean that if one acknowledges differences between the races on a variety of controversial variables, one must be a racist, a separatist, a fascist or a Nazi? Yes. This is what it means. Any socialist who steps outside of PC idiocy on race will find himself embraced by some other funny socialists. Almost all such persons will be sympathetic towards White racism, White separatism, fascism and Nazism.

Whew. Well, allow me to step out of the box here for a second. This blog will make the outrageous statement that race realism (a recognition that there are non-trivial differences between the races) and anti-racism can go hand and hand. Just because there are average differences between races does not mean we have to turn into a bunch of racist jerks, much less racial separatists.

There are specific, subspecific and racial differences all across the natural world of biology, and none of it necessarily leads to hating this or that brand of organism or critter. For instance, here in California, we have various threatened and endangered species that I know a lot about. We have Tipton Kangaroo Rats and California Red-legged Frogs and Alameda Whipsnakes.

I assure that all of these damned critters act different. I will assure you that a California Red-legged Frog acts a Hell of a lot different than a Foothill Yellow-legged frog, and an Alameda Whipsnake acts a Hell of a lot different than a Pacific Gopher Snake, and a Tipton Kangaroo Rat acts a lot different than a Dusky-Footed Woodrat. I, lover of nature, love all of these critters.

Why be a speciesist, a critter racist, lining up with the Tipton Kangaroo Rats and swearing to drive the California Red-legged Frogs to extinction? I, lover of humans, love all humans. Why should I be a human-critter racist, lining up with the White human critters against this or that non-White human critters? They act different. So? So do all the other critters.

The reason for the Left’s opposition to race realism is quite simple. All we have to do is look at the agenda of those big names promoting hardcore race realism. They’re all White, and almost all, or all, of them are on the Right or the Far Right, and I haven’t found one yet who was not a hardcore racist.

Furthermore, every prominent race realist out there supports getting rid of civil rights and anti-discrimination laws. The reason being that if there are average differences between races, people ought to be able to discriminate racially or ethnically against individuals on the basis of those averages.

But average differences mean nothing when it comes to individuals. Individuals are individuals, and groups are groups. You can’t tally up group stuff and use it to thumbs up or thumbs down on individuals in the group. Forget it. Group differences be damned, one still must treat individuals as individuals.

With such a bunch of ugly creeps running the show, is it any wonder that decent people run away from race realism in droves?

It’s really sad that socialists have to choose between fascists and PC airheads. There’s got to be more space in the room than that. Come on.