Mr. and Mrs. Billy Howard, respectively CEO and President of Howard Industries, are a working couple who know how to get things done. Married two years after Billy founded the firm, they have built up a company in the difficult field of manufacturing which according to Wikipedia has a net worth of nearly $1 billion.( Howards building businesses with ‘windows of opportunity’ By Jeter, Lynne Wilbanks The Mississippi Business Journal Monday, June 12 2000 ) Now they hold the distinction of providing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with its biggest ever catch on an enforcement raid (U.S. immigration cops nab 595 in largest-ever raid Reuters Tuesday Aug 26th 2008).

So it is instructive to see how they deploy themselves politically.

Answer: Mrs. Howard is a maxed-out donor to John McCain. (Her husband made no Presidential donations)

Question: Will anyone in the MSM ask McCain to comment on the Howard Industries scandal, and whether he thinks his former Amnesty enthusiasm had any connection with Howard’s support?

Meantime, turning to that section of the media which actually does its job, VDARE.com congratulates our old friend William Gheen’s operation ALIPAC on a tremendous related scoop. Their discussion thread on the Howard raid was joined by a worker in the plant using the name ICEFAN, who at last count has posted 23 illuminating items (starting on Page 2), including footage and some acidic comment:

Yeah, I work at Howard Ind. and ICE finally came!!! It was awesome. Helicopter, hundreds of agents, made my day.

(more…)

An excerpt from  No Apology from Gwinnett Superintendent in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

During a discussion two weeks ago, an administrator said the disproportionate discipline of minorities is a problem for school districts nationwide except in Idaho, according to a study.

[Gwinnett County Schools Superintendent J. Alvin] Wilbanks then asked: “Do they have any blacks in Idaho? They don’t have many.”

Wilbanks has said his statements were not meant to be “racist” or “insensitive.”

However, the NAACP has asked for Wilbanks to apologize.

Wilbanks simply doesn’t understand professional protocol. The appropriate, time-honored way for educrats to respond to learning about the exceptionality of Idaho is to stroke their chins thoughtfully, remark, “Clearly, we all have much to learn from Idaho,” then debate whether the official fact-finding mission to Idaho to study its racial sensitivity should go to Sun Valley in February or Coeur D’Alene in August

It’s amazing that a firm like Howard Industries, which is doing some of what little manufacturing is still done in the United States, has so many alleged illegals, from so many places, in Laurel, Mississippi, population 20,000. Mississippi has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.

Wikipedia says at this moment that

There has been a steady influx of Hispanic migrant labor in the last few years, most of them being employed at Howard Industries, Sanderson Farms and independent labor. Companies in the area tend to recruit foreign workers due to the benefits of the federal government subsidizing their cost for training of those on worker visas. Those on visas also tend to be paid substantially less

As is frequently the case, it’s difficult to tell where Wikipedia is getting these facts, but if it’s true, that would be one reason for Howard Industries having so many illegals. Another reason might be this story:

OSHA cites Laurel industry, Laurel Leader-Call, June 11, 2008

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has proposed $193,000 in penalties against Howard Industries for 54 violations of federal safety rules at the company’s two manufacturing locations in Laurel.[More]

So which is it that made Howard Industries hire so many foreigners–cheaper, (Federally-subsidized!) labor, or the fact that foreigners are less likely to complain about safety issues? Email Howard Industries and ask them.

Nearly 600 Arrested in US Immigration Raid
By VOA News 27 August 2008

Suspected illegal immigrants exit the federal courthouse in Hattiesburg, Miss., to leave in a U.S. Marshal’s van to a overnight holding facility, 26 Aug 2008

U.S. immigration agents have arrested nearly 600 people at a plant in the southern state of Mississippi in the single largest workplace enforcement raid in the nation’s history.

Officials with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) say agents arrested illegal immigrants, including suspects from Peru, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Honduras, Brazil and Germany.

The raid took place Monday at a Howard Industries plant, a facility that manufactures electronic transformers, in Laurel.

Some 475 were transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Jena, in neighboring Louisiana. At least 100 others, including caregivers and juveniles, were released for what authorities described as humanitarian reasons.

Commenters ask why I haven’t had anything to say about the U.S. gold medal in men’s basketball. I haven’t had anything new to say because I said it all in my American Conservative article right after the 2004 Athens Olympics:

Perhaps the most important event of the [2004] Olympics will turn out to be the failure of the once untouchable U.S. Olympic basketball team, an all-black squad of physically gifted NBA stars that was beaten by better-shooting and more collaborative teams from Argentina, Lithuania, and even Puerto Rico.

In the 1970s stereotype, white American players were the dogged defenders, while blacks were the flashy scorers. Then, the John Thompson-Patrick Ewing teams at Georgetown U. made defense fashionable among blacks, leading to a great leap forward in the quality of NBA play that culminated with the incomparable 1992 Olympic Dream Team. Unfortunately, the trend went too far and many blacks lost interest in working on their outside shooting, which proved disastrous in Athens.

Darryl Dawkins, the former NBA center who called himself “Chocolate Thunder,” has become an insightful minor league coach. “Black basketball is much more individualistic,” he told Charlie Rosen of FoxSports. “With so many other opportunities closed to young black kids, … if somebody makes you look bad with a shake-and-bake move, then you’ve got to come right back at him with something better, something more stylish… It’s all about honor, pride, and establishing yourself as a man.”

Dawkins, whose showboating Philadelphia 76ers lost to Bill Walton’s Portland Trailblazers in an epic 1977 NBA Finals confrontation between the black and white games, now says, “The black game by itself is too chaotic and much too selfish… White culture places more of a premium on winning, and less on self-indulgent preening and chest-beating.”

Arguing that the best teams combine both styles, Dawkins pointed out, “In basketball and in civilian life, freedom without structure winds up being chaotic and destructive.”

With luck, this Olympic embarrassment will serve as a wake-up call to African-American males that gangsta rap attitudes are needlessly undermining not just black basketball, but also the race as a whole.

The NBA got the message that the Americans had to stop playing like rap stars and start playing again like a basketball team.

In the early years of this decade, the Immigration debate was much enriched the valiant efforts of Stephen Steinlight, who undertook what can only be termed a crusade to convert fellow members of the Jewish community to the view that mass immigration was bad for them, and incidentally also for America.

Guided by Mark Krikorian’s CIS, Steinlight amusingly made heavy use of that outfit’s policy of triangulation against VDARE.com’s Peter Brimelow and the more serious element of the immigration reform movement. Quite reasonably, he centered his case on the unwisdom from the Jewish point of view of allowing high levels of Muslim immigration – although, as befitted a descendent of the old Jewish Socialist tradition, he always displayed a full understanding of the damage mass immigration does to working people.

This truly courageous and enterprising effort seemed in recent years to have sunk without trace – although we did get a good joke from him early last year.

Now the Agriprocessors scandal has allowed him an Op-Ed chance at the JTA news service: Ignoring problems of illegal immigration leads to exploitation August 24 2008 which couches his appeal almost exclusively in terms of the damage to poorer Americans:

…ignoring the problem of illegal immigration virtually guarantees that Agriprocessors’ despicable practices will be repeated elsewhere….Rendered myopic by political correctness and uninformed sentimentality about immigration, many in the Jewish community have failed to recognize that the AgriProcessors nightmare is an inevitable consequence of massive immigration by the unskilled and uneducated poor — legal and illegal – into a knowledge-based, post-industrial society…

Massive immigration has disastrous consequences for America’s most vulnerable: the unemployed, partially employed, working poor, recent legal immigrants, African Americans and elderly working populations. Legalization will sanction and perpetuate this assault on struggling Americans by flooding the workforce with more cheap labor.

By supporting legalization of illegal immigrants, the Jewish establishment endorses the Bush administration’s immigration policy, which seeks to create a huge, permanent legal underclass of impoverished immigrants that will drive down wages and worsen working conditions for all Americans.

Of course it is significant that Steinlight finds it expedient facing this particular audience to almost ignore the cultural component:

We can’t mend the whole world here, but massive illegal immigration can devastate America. It endangers national security, the social safety net, our most vulnerable citizens and the dignity of American labor. It challenges national cohesion and sovereignty, and it’s producing a population explosion with incalculably ruinous consequences to our environment and quality of life. (VDARE.com emphasis).

But it is not necessary to be a Marxist to comprehend that floods of vulnerable, exploitable labor will indeed produce – exploitation.

Some feel that the rigid dogmatism of the great bulk of Jewish opinion in favor of open borders is a function of their hostility to their host society. But it is also a simple fact that given the actual economic and social status this group now has, it is also very much in their class interest.

Stephen Steinlight deserves praise for seeing through this and persevering in his lonely struggle.