How sweet! Just in time for Valentine’s Day! Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has proclaimed this week as “National Salute to Hospitalized Veterans” in the Land of Lincoln.

“Our veterans have bravely served our country in defense of our freedom,” said Blago (the son of “hard-working immigrants,” blah,blah.,blah) “I want to encourage everybody to take some time this week to honor and give thanks to these brave men and women, and to let them know that the sacrifices they have made will never be forgotten, “ [Blagojevich honors state veteransBelleville News-Democrat, ,Feb. 14, 2007]

I hope you veterans in Illinois - and your comrades nationwide - see such proclamations for what they really are: Pure theater. You’re going to have to learn to live with the fact that two-faced career politicians like Blago already have “forgotten” your contributions. In fact, they may have never really given a damn about the values and principles which many of you risked your lives to protect.

Did you all wear the uniform so people could walk across our borders, wipe their feet on our laws and sovereignty, and then come into your communities waving foreign flags and demanding respect and dignity?

Blago began showing just how much he valued your contributions in May 2003, when he signed into law a bill giving instate tuition for illegal aliens. A couple years ago he also put his stamp of approval on foreign consular ID cards like Mexico’s matricula consular. And he’s also repeatedly said he would OK drivers licenses for illegals if a bill lands on his desk.

I know what you’re thinking: What the hell was it all for? And if you don’t say “corporate profits” and “votes,” well, like Humphrey Bogart’s character “Rick” in Casablanca,you were “misinformed.”

Was the recent mass murder in Salt Lake City another case of Sudden Jihad Syndrome? The shooter, who killed six people at a mall, was a Bosnian Muslim refugee, a fact which many news stories have ignored. An off-duty policeman shot and killed 18-year-old Sulejman Talovic, so his motivations may never be known. But there is no doubt he went to the mall prepared to kill as many people as possible. (Victims are given attention by the Deseret News.)

Talovic was armed with a shotgun, a .38-caliber handgun and “a backpack full of ammunition,” Burbank said. Around the man’s waist was a bandolier of shotgun shells.

“He had a pump shotgun,” said one witness, DeEtta Barta. “He was shooting, and he shot about four shots.” [...]

Ajka Omerovic, who said she was Talovic’s aunt, visited the home Tuesday afternoon. She told the Deseret Morning News that Talovic had been “a good boy.” She said the family are Muslims from Bosnia who had lived in the vicinity of Sarajevo.
[6 Minutes of Horror, Deseret News 2/14/07]

Sudden Jihad Syndrome, a phrase coined by Daniel Pipes, refers to the instance of Muslims living in the west who appear assimilated but abruptly go postal and begin killing infidels. At some point the thin layer of western acculturation disappears and they revert to the jihadist ideology they have heard since childhood in the mosque.

Now the kid might have been a wacked-out Goth type following the Columbine style. But there is no shortage of previous cases of immigrants going jihadi, so young Sulejman had plenty of Islamic role models.

Consider all the Muslim “random” acts of violence in the last few years:

•   the shootings in the Seattle Jewish community center

•   the SUV rampage in North Carolina

•   the SUV rampage in northern California

•   Hesham Mohamed Hadayet’s murders at the LAX El Al desk

•   Mohammed Ali Alayed’s throat-slitting murder of his Jewish friend Ariel Sellouk in Houston

•   Iraqi-born Nashville resident Ahmed Hassan Al-Uqaily’s purchase of illegal weapons for the purpose of “going jihad”

Recently Patrick Cleburne wrote in an important blog on VDARE.com

“Personally, though, I still think the more persuasive explanation is that these Senators are selfish, corrupt, and unAmerican.”

I think there is a serious problem with the senate as an institution. Originally, the Senate was intended to represent “established interests” and to keep the government of the United States from changing rapidly with the tides of public opinion. The problem, as was noted by Tom Piatak, is that the United States political life is no longer managed by a “Burkean elite“–but by elites that are essentially “feeding” by liquidating assets created by prior elites.

I also think that the article cited was a bit inaccurate in its characterization of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. Graham didn’t entirely make a choice between “family and career.” Graham’s parents died when he was a young serviceman, and, with the support of his military employers, Graham returned to South Carolina to attend law school and adopted his younger sister.

Whatever my differences with his politics, that is an intensely responsible act that deserves credit. I don’t see Graham as a “selfish” individual so much as someone that is so intensely focused on the urgent needs of those near and dear to him, he lost sight of the bigger picture.

In the Oliver Stone biography of Richard Nixon, that Nixon says that the only way for a poor man (albeit quite talented, Nixon came from a family of very modest means) to get ahead in politics was “kissing ass.”

That describes the US Senate today: it is a club for extremely wealthy people–and those willing to toady to wealthy interests in the most extreme fashion.

Inequality of income is only part of the picture. Kennedy and McCain both came from families with substantial wealth. Rumor has it that it required $5 Million in strategic donations to buy off Harvard University officials after Teddy’s cheating indiscretion to permit graduation in waiver of Harvard’s rules for mere mortals. The profile of men who marry heiresses like McCain and Brownback is typical neither of the population as a whole, or men of extreme accomplishment.

The original intent of the US Senate was to act as ambassadors from the State legislatures. Popular election of senators has proven itself to be largely a money contest–practically election by auction. It is clear that there is money to be made by liquidating the assets of the broad base of the American public in service of the wealthy.

I favor fundamental changes to the US political process. Electing state congressional delegations via proportional representation–as leaders like Dennis Kucinich have endorsed-would give much representation to Americans. There are strong indications that this would fundamentally improve the situation with US immigration policy. While there may be problems with democracy, the immigration policy crisis in the US is not the result of too much democracy, but by a government that overly insulated from the will of the people.

That leaves the question of what to do with the Senate. I think the basic idea of a bicameral legislature has served the US well over time. While a return to election of Senators by state legislatures might be an improvement, that isn’t the only option here. A while back, some Brits were having a debate about how to reform their House of Lords. One interesting idea that was proposed was to give seats automatically to people of extreme accomplishment. Under that proposal, for example, British Nobel prize winners would automatically be given a seat in the House of Lords. In the case of the US, a strengthening of existing institutions like the National Academy of Sciences might be in order.

I agree that the Senate is full of vile, disgusting creatures. Men of genuine accomplishment are sadly an anomaly there. The existence of the K Street Lobbying industry is a national disgrace. The American people deserve a group of leaders completely focused on managing America–not preparing to “cash out” on book deals or making speeches for foreign potentates-or worried about how to make payments on expensive Georgetown estates.

I think there is some merit in Singapore’s practice of greatly increasing the pay of their political officials while tightening the financial regulations politicians find themselves under. Campaign donation practices common in the US would be considered bribery in much of the world. Ideally, I would tie congressional compensation and pensions to some ratio of the median income in the US so regular debates on pay are less necessary.

I would also set up an independent monitoring of Senate and house ethics via a Citizen’s assembly(a jury of citizens selected at random from the voter rolls like British Columbia recently used for electoral reform)

Ultimately, the problems in the Senate aren’t an issue of the weakness of character of the individuals involved, but the type of political process and culture we Americans have-and the type so character it selects for.

Jason Okon is a three-year Army veteran who served in Iraq and received a Bronze Star for valor. Now he is lying in intensive care in an Arizona hospital after being stabbed in his own yard by an illegal alien.

Okon and his pregnant wife Elizabeth and their two children were getting ready to move to Wisconsin because Jason had been unable to find a job in Arizona. He was cleaning up the yard one day prior to moving.

Elizabeth Okon said a man, later identified as 34-year-old Armando Martinez-Lozano, approached Okon with a knife and said something to him in Spanish. She said her husband told Martinez-Lozano to leave, and the other man stabbed Okon in the stomach and ran away. [...]

Police said Martinez-Lozano is an illegal immigrant and the Immigration and Naturalization Service has placed a hold on him.

Okon’s family and friends said they think the stabbing was a hate crime because Okon is a decorated soldier. His wife said he often wore his camouflage around town and in their yard.

“This is domestic terrorism in its rawest form,” family friend Albert Fernandez said.
[Soldier Stabbed After Return From Iraq, KPHO News 2/13/07]

Economist Greg Clark’s Exciting New Book:

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

“He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind” –Samuel Johnson

The basic outline of world economic history is surprisingly simple. Indeed it can be summarized in one diagram: figure 1.1. Before 1800 income per person – the food, clothing, heat, light, housing, and furnishings available per head - varied across societies and epochs. But there was no upward trend. A simple but powerful mechanism explained in this book, the Malthusian Trap, kept incomes within a range narrow by modern standards. …

Since the economic laws governing human society were those that govern all animal societies, mankind was subject to natural selection throughout the Malthusian Era, even after the arrival of settled agrarian societies with the Neolithic Revolution. The Darwinian struggle that shaped human nature did not end with the Neolithic Revolution that transformation of hunter-gatherers into settled agriculturalists, but continued indeed right up till the Industrial Revolution.

For England we will see compelling evidence of differential survival of types in the years 1250-1800. In particular economic success translated powerfully into reproductive success. The richest men had twice as many surviving children at death as the poorest. The poorest individuals in Malthusian England had so few surviving children that their families were dying out. Preindustrial England was thus a world of constant downward mobility. Given the static nature of the Malthusian economy, the superabundant children of the rich had to, on average, move down the social hierarchy. The craftsmen’s sons became laborers, merchant’s sons petty traders, large landowner’s sons smallholders.

Just as people were shaping economies, the economy of the pre-industrial era was shaping people, at the least culturally, perhaps even genetically. The arrival of an institutionally stable capital-intensive pre-industrial economic system in England set in motion an economic process that rewarded middle class values with reproductive success, generation after generation. This selection process was accompanied by changes in characteristics of the pre-industrial economy that seem to owe largely to the population displaying more “middle class” preferences. Interest rates fell, murder rates declined, work hours increased, and numeracy and literacy spread even to the lower reaches of the society.

The book proposes a variant of these evolutionary ideas, along the lines suggested by Oded Galor and Omar Moav. The Neolithic Revolution which established a settled agrarian society with massive stocks of capital changed the nature of selective pressures operating on human culture and genes. Ancient Babylonia in 2,000 BC may have seemed superficially to be an economy not dissimilar from that of England in 1800. But the intervening years had profoundly shaped the culture, and maybe even the genes, of the members of English society. These changes were what created the possibility of an Industrial Revolution only in 1,800 AD not in 2,000 BC.

Other scholars have recently posed the challenge of “Why an Industrial Revolution in England as opposed to China, Japan or India?” The speculation here, and it is just a speculation, is that England’s island position and its highly stable institutions, which resulted in a surprisingly orderly and internally peaceable society all the way from 1066 to the present, advanced the process of preference evolution more rapidly than in the more turbulent agrarian economies.

This is a gem that was published last year in Common Dreams by Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter. It is important because it explains some of the fundamental reasons for the huge problem the US has with illegal immigration:

The recent ferment on immigration policy has been so narrow that it has excluded the real issue: family-sustaining wages for workers both north and south of the border. The role of the North American Free Trade Agreement and misnamed ‘free trade’ has been scarcely mentioned in the increasingly bitter debate over the fate of America’s 11 to 12 million illegal aliens.

NAFTA was sold to the American public as the magic formula that would improve the American economy at the same time it would raise up the impoverished Mexican economy. The time has come to look at the failures of this type of trade agreement before we engage in more and lower the economic prospects of all workers affected.

While there has been some media coverage of NAFTA’s ruinous impact on US industrial communities, there has been even less media attention paid to its catastrophic effects in Mexico:

* NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven the Mexican farmer off the land due to low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products. Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those that cross the border to feed their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50%. No wonder many so Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their ‘death warrant.’
* NAFTA’s service-sector rules allowed big firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to displace locally-based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses have been eliminated.
* Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the crushing of union organizing drives as government policy, has resulted in sweatshop pay running sweatshops along the border where wages typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.

So rather than improving living standards, Mexican wages have actually fallen since NAFTA. The initial growth in the number of jobs has leveled off, with China’s even more repressive labor system luring US firms to locate there instead.

I’ve previously proposed that we look at a regional guarenteed income to help contain disruptive migrations. It is silly to assume that we’ve seen this huge migration either because these immigrants love the US or because they are just greedy folks.

If we want a sane immigration policy, we need to look at how folks make money in an insane economy-and change the rules fundamentally.

In today’s news, and predicted by Ed Rubenstein in 2004: see Will War Bring 2.5 million Iraqi “Refugees”?, May 25, 2004.

ABC News: White House Opens Doors to Iraq Refugees
By ANNE GEARAN AP Diplomatic Writer

WASHINGTON Feb 14, 2007 (AP)— The Bush administration plans to allow about 7,000 Iraqi refugees to settle in the United States over the next year, a huge expansion at a time of mounting international pressure to help millions who have fled their homes in the nearly four-year-old war.

The United States has allowed only 463 Iraq refugees into the country since the war began in March 2003, even though some 3.8 million have been uprooted. A senior State Department official described the expanded program on condition of anonymity ahead of a formal announcement later Wednesday.

The administration also plans to pledge $18 million for a worldwide resettlement and relief program. The United Nations has asked for $60 million from nations around the world.

It started with Wells Fargo Bank offering mortgage loans and Citibank offering free checking and savings accounts to illegal aliens so I suppose it was only a matter of time…

Bank of America is now offering credit cards to illegal immigrants.

Fox News is all over the story , and that’s wonderful ,but they are reporting the story as though this problem just sprung out of thin air this morning! [Report: Bank of America's New Credit Card Targets Illegal Immigrants , Fox News, February 14, 2007] Maybe it’s just this particular issue but aiding and abeting illegal immigrants has been a problem in this country for a long time.

In-state tuition for illegal immigrants, home loans, welfare, free public education…all aiding and abeting!

Bank of America is just one in a long line of pathetic, greedy financial institutions. Not only are they (in my opinion) breaking the law, they are hardly doing these people a favor. There is no way around it: THEY ARE RIPPING THESE PEOPLE OFF!! TAKING ADVANTAGE OF (WHAT ARE MORE OFTEN THAN NOT) POOR PEOPLE! Yeah, and B of A claims to be helping them…it’s sickening.

First or all, they interest rate for these ards is roughly 21% AND that is in addition to a high annual fee. The applicants must also have had a bank account–either savings or checking.

The bank claims to be helping what they call people without social security numbers (illegal immigrants) by showing them how to establish credit. Hmm…how (and to whom) do they report payments etc. without social security numbers? I do not know of any credit reporting agency that does not maintain files via social security number.

Bottom line: Nobody benefits from this deal except for Bank of America.

Personally, I wouldn’t use Bank of America to make change at this point. I hope Americans say “ENOUGH!!” and avoid B of A like the plague!

For more information click here.

Contact info for the B of A piggies: EMAIL

A large number of Americans appear to have realized that income inequality has increased and that massive immigration is substantially responsible. And they are increasingly willing to say so.

A frequently-expressed view of Peter Brimelow’s is that the current generation of political “leaders” was formed intellectually before immigration was discernable as a social problem. Quite possibly they will literally have to die off before public policy will change – people rarely have new ideas.

The two concepts are ingeniously melded in a posting at the Old Atlantic Lighthouse blog: Kennedy McCain rode income inequality wave. This explicates the view that the old men in the Senate seeking to further flood the country with low quality labor – and hence engineer a massive wealth transfer from the working to the upper classes – themselves started out in life benefiting from the lowest income inequality situation in recent American history:

Specter who sponsored S. 2611 was part of the group that could get married early, have kids, and still have a career. Now he is against the young people of today being able to do this….Specter, McCain and Kennedy were born in the 1930’s and became young adults in the 1950’s while income inequality was falling. They could build careers and have families while still young. Two Senators, Hagel and Martinez were born in 1946. They became 21 in 1967. They had families and full careers as they timed the income inequality graph perfectly, low income inequality when they were young and rising while they got on top. Both became rich on this curve.
Lindsey Graham and Sam Brownback were born in the mid 1950’s. Graham had to start out as the curve was getting worse. He had to choose a career or family and chose career. He has never had children. Brownback solved this problem by marrying an heiress and has 5 children and a career…
The Senators for S. 2611 with amnesty and more legal immigration rode the same inequality curve. When they started out, inequality was at a bottom and they could get good paying summer jobs, go to college, and have kids right after college. They think their life is normal …. they have been on top while income inequality went up, but in their minds, they worked their way up…
So they feel morally superior and entitled to vote for immigration…

This article and the accompanying links comprise a great resource and took a lot of work. Congratulations to Old Atlantic Lighthouse, which, as we have previously noted, has done valuable work before.

Personally, though, I still think the more persuasive explanation is that these Senators are selfish, corrupt, and unAmerican.