Kenya was a Cold War ally of the U.S. For example, Kenya boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games at President Jimmy Carter’s request, a bigger sacrifice for Kenya than most of other 28 countries that boycotted, since the Olympic running events provide Kenya with its main shot at glory on the international stage. The international prestige of Kenya’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta and Kenya’s relatively successful evolution, meant that Kenya’s “pro-capitalist” (in truth, crony capitalist) policies were a valuable counterexample during the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds of Third World countries.

No thanks, however, to Harvard-trained economist Barack Obama Sr., who consistently argued within Kenya’s elite for socialism and ditching the pro-American orientation. In an important piece of original research, Greg Ransom of PrestoPundit shows that leftism was the Dream from My Father:

There’s a big mystery at the heart of Barack Obama’s Dreams For My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. What was Barack Obama doing seeking out Marxist professors in college? Why did Obama choose a Communist Party USA member as his socio- political counselor in high school? Why was he spending his time studying neocolonialism and the writings of Frantz Fanon, the pro-violence author of “the Communist Manifesto of neocolonialsm”, in college? Why did he take time out from his studies at Columbia to attend socialist conferences at Cooper Union?

And there is more mystery in the book. Why does Obama consider working in a consulting house for international business like being “a spy behind enemy lines?” Why does he repeatedly find it so hard to explain his political views to others? Why was he driven to become a left-aligned political organizer? It’s a question Obama again and again can’t seem to answer to the satisfaction of the interlocutors in his own memoir.

If there is a mystery at the heart of Barack Obama’s Dreams For My Father, one thing is not left a mystery, the fact that Barack Obama organized his life on the ideals given to him by his Kenyan father. Obama tells us, “All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I .. tried to take as my own.” (p. 220) And what was that image? It was “the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals ..” (p. 278) What is more, Obama tells us that, “It was into my father’s image .. that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.” And also that, “I did feel that there was something to prove .. to my father” in his efforts at political organizing. (p. 230)

So we know that his father’s ideals were a driving force in his life, but the one thing that Obama does not give us are the contents of those ideals. …

A bit of research at the library reveals the answers about Barack Obama’s father and his father’s convictions which Obama withholds from his readers. A first hint comes from authors E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and David William Cohen in their book The Risks of Knowledge (Ohio U. Press, 2004). On page 182 of their book they describe how Barack Obama’s father, a Harvard trained economist, attacked the economic proposals of pro-Western ‘third way” leader Tom Mboya from the socialist left, siding with communist-allied leader Oginga Odinga [father of current Luo leader Raila Odinga, who recently claimed to be Sen. Obama's cousin], in a paper Barack Obama’s father for the for the East Africa Journal. As Odhiambo and Cohen write:

“The debates [over economic policy] pitted .. Mboya against .. Oginga Odinga and radical economists Dharam Ghai and Barrack Obama, who critiqued the document for being neither African nor socialist enough.”

(more…)

A recent article in the El Paso Times, by Brandi Grissom [March 28th, 2008] is entitled Hispanics to Get Say on English Standards”. Here’s what it reports:

Texas education leaders developing new English and reading standards acquiesced Thursday to pressure from teachers and lawmakers, allowing for more Hispanic input.

“I’m pleased that there was a compromise — and that they just didn’t shut out the Hispanic expertise,” said Rene Nuñez, State Board of Education member from El Paso.

“Hispanic input” and “expertise” Does that mean expertise of English education experts who happen to be of Hispanic ancestry, or Hispanic activists? Well, I think we already know the answer to that question.

The State Board of Education spent hours discussing a new curriculum, defining test standards and the contents of textbooks. Educators and lawmakers had criticized the proposed curriculum, saying it was too prescriptive and ignored Hispanic students’ needs.

So Hispanic students don’t have the same needs as those of other Texas students ?

Board Chairman Don McLeroy said last week there was no time to make major changes because the curriculum needed to be adopted in time for the 2009-10 school year.
Wednesday, though, the board heard pleas for more input from bilingual educators and from experts with knowledge about how Hispanic students learn.
“If we’re not meeting the needs of those individual children, especially our English-language learners, they are at a tremendous disadvantage,” said Paul Haupt, state coordinator for the El Paso, Texas and International Reading associations and a consultant for Socorro Independent School District.

And thanks to the “Hispanic input” and “expertise”, the reading list is being eliminated:

Teachers also objected to a reading list, which they said removed flexibility.

Nope, wouldn’t want a reading list.

The board unanimously agreed to eliminate the reading list and to consider input from Hispanic teachers and two experts, including Elena Izquierdo, University of Texas at El Paso bilingual education professor and president of the Texas Association for Bilingual Education.

Hmmm. Do you suppose that bilingual educators have a vested interest in continuing bilingual education ?

As for the reading list, notice they aren’t changing the reading list, or modifying it, or even adding books that would supposedly be appropriate for Hispanics. No, they’re just scrapping the reading list.

Texas readers take note – the final vote on the “revised English and reading standards” is scheduled for next month, so Texas readers still have time to share their input and expertise with the Texas State Board of Education. You can contact them here and share your input and expertise.

In his saner moments, Alan Greenspan says things about economic inequality that are fairly reasonable:

As I’ve often said… this [increasing income inequality] is not the type of thing which a democratic society—a capitalist democratic society—can really accept without addressing. - Alan Greenspan, June 2005 ”

Alan Greenspan has also called income inequality a “very disturbing trend.”

However, Dan Stein points out, this is part of a contradictory view on the part of Greenspan:

But former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently admitted the real agenda: “Significantly opening up immigration to skilled workers … would compete with high-income people, driving more income equality.” In 2007, he further opined that, “Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world. If we open up a significant window for skilled (foreign) workers, that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income

Now, there are some basic problems here. Many of the countries that have the least inequality of wealth and income have rather restrictive immigration policies. Japan is a good example.

Furthermore, many of these “skilled worker” visas apply to jobs that aren’t widely well paying. The profession most impacted by skilled worker visas has been computer professionals. The median income for computer professionals in 2003 was 60,350-and the median income for H-1b workers was $53000. That level of income would not have put either group into the upper 20% for Americans in that year(median income was $43,318 and the upper 20% had income of $86,000.

There are other important factors here too. Many IT professional-particularly those on the upper income end, work in areas like New York City, Washington, DC, or Silicon Valley with exceptionally high cost of living (and in the case of Silicon Valley, the hidden cost of a community with more men per capita than Alaska). Thus, for many technical workers, a higher than average income isn’t necessarily a ticket to obtaining substantial assets–or even getting in a position to support a family comfortably.

What has been driving economic inequality in the US hasn’t been the income of workers in that band from the top 20% though the top 5%. Rather economic inequality in the US has been driven by the increased wealth and income of folks in the upper 1%.

Now, a big chunk of those folks in the upper 1% do it with income from property. According to Ed Wolff, at NYU, about 1% of American families have assets above $5 Million. Now, income from that level of property would be at least $150,000/year even if invested instruments that are carefully protected from inflation. That means about 20% of the top 5% of US worker get to that income level purely by ownership of property. Now others do a mix of activities-they work, but they do work that you have to have property as a ticket into the game (i.e. like people who buy a seat in the stock exchange or commercial realtors who trade substantial properties). Another big chunk of high income earners have direct personal relationships with the wealthy.

Some of the skills most likely to get someone into that upper 5% or 1% are hard to get outside the USA. A Yale Law degree or Harvard MBA don’t really have any foreign equivalents. For that matter, just getting licensed to practice law or accountancy in the US would be hard for folks to do without coming to the US.

What skilled worker visas mean is that wealthy interests in the US can pay employees by mining the value of the citizenship of specific groups of Americans-those that have invested in the “human capital” of the affected careers. US citizenship is valuable-and there are lot of folks willing to work to obtain that value. Thus, the shareholders of large companies-and those individuals with the wealth to directly hire such benefit inordinately-not the mythical consumer.

What this all means, is that skilled worker immigration may actually be making income inequality–and other forms of economic inequality in the US worse rather than better. If you want to address economic inequality, you need to get to the root of the problem. Wealth is more unequal in its distribution than income. If our goal is to contain economic inequality, it would make more sense to tax wealth directly as proposed by Huey Long decades ago–and more recently supported by Ralph Nader–than to target folks slightly more successful than average via predatory immigration policies.

All open borders can ultimately do is make economic conditions in the US more closely reflect that of the rest of the world. Now, as a whole, the world is a pretty oligarchical place with political and economic power concentrated in a few hands. The existence of a democratic republic like the US is a rarity by global standards-and something that will require real care to maintain.

If there’s any doubt that slavery has returned to America, check out the wages and working conditions for illegal alien carwasheros in Los Angeles. Naturally, corrupt, anti-American unions want to organize these workers, rather than insist on their deportation–a policy that would aid citizen workers and the country at large.

That first day the organizers came, Varela’s insides churned with worry. He was terrified at the thought of losing this job. But he felt his boss owed him–all of them–more than the $3 to $4 an hour they typically were paid. He would see what this union meeting was all about.

Month after month, at Wednesday-night meetings in the Pico-Union area, Nary’s workers sat among dozens of carwasheros who’d straggled in after work from all over Los Angeles. Like the Nary’s workers, these men were being paid $40 a day — or less — for up to 12 hours of work. They said their bosses threatened and screamed at them.[At L.A. carwashes, taking a stand, By Sonia Nazario, Los Angeles Times, March 27, 2008]

Below, demonstrators protest the wages that “carwasheros” receive at a workplace in Los Angeles.

Today’s illegal alien employers often pay wages that cannot support the most minimal standard of living. But taxpayers are forced against their will to make up the difference, by paying for food stamps, healthcare, housing vouchers, education for illegal kiddies through college and whatever else illegal advocates can successfully finagle. This is how slavery in America has “progressed” between 1850 and now.

For a reminder of when Americans did those jobs, see the trailer for the 1976 blaxploitation movie, Car Wash.

Mike Hethmon of the Immigration Law Reform Institute spoke at a conference in Washington in 2007–these speeches are now online.

The legal fight they’re engaged in involves litigation, and drafting laws for places like Hazleton, Pennsylvania.

More videos are available at the Social Contract Press website.