David Goldman writes at CNN:

The economy shed 533,000 jobs in November, according to a government report Friday - bringing the year’s total job losses to 1.9 million.

What is less obvious here is what the real picture is for American workers.

There has actually been a recent decline in the illegal alien population the US. What is less obvious is how many of those workers were originally reported in employment statistics(i.e. those falsely using social security numbers).

• 2.0 Million Overall Jobs Loss 2008.
• (1.3 Million reduction in Illegal Alien Employment(estimated)
• 0.7 Million Natural Increase in US work force
• 0.65 Million Legal Immigration workforce increase
• 0.20 Million Increase in Guest worker Population(estimate)

The estimate of the total number of outstanding guest worker visas is tricky-because good figures on that are hard to find-since there is a constant conversion of some workers to green cards-and others may temporarily repatriate. However, I think a growth in the guest worker population of 200,000 is a conservative estimate.

We also need to look at the increase in self-employment in marginal–or illegal–businesses and growth of the prison population as those figures emerge for 2008. The decline in job quality for Americans has been even more striking.

Still, this suggests the overall picture of jobs growth relative to the American work force is even worse than is being portrayed in the news. Something that can be done rapidly is to substantially raise fees on all guest worker programs, raise fees for all forms of legal immigration, eliminate all forms of legal familial immigration other than those of spouses and minor children and to enforce employer sanctions to continue the reduction of the illegal alien population in the US.

Sarah Michalak, [Send her mail] is the Associate Provost and University Librarian at the University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has just banned Christmas trees from the libraries at her  university, after she found that it was the last university to still have Christmas.

UNC libraries to forgo Christmas trees
Chapel Hill library chief says staffers complained about the display.
By Eric Ferreri, [Email] Charlotte Observer

December 5, 2008

CHAPEL HILL For as long as anyone can remember, Christmas trees adorned with lights and ornaments have greeted holiday season visitors to UNC Chapel Hill’s two main libraries.

Not this year.

The trees, which have stood in the lobby areas of Wilson and Davis libraries each December, were kept in storage this year at the behest of Sarah Michalak, the associate provost for university libraries.

Michalak’s decision followed several years of queries and complaints from library employees and patrons bothered by the Christian display, Michalak said this week.

Michalak said that banishing the Christmas displays was not an easy decision but that she asked around to library colleagues at Duke, N.C. State and elsewhere and found no other one where Christmas trees were displayed.

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The Treasury Department, you know, the guys with the deep circles under their eyes and recycling bins full of empty Red Bull cans, has come up with yet another plan to save the world by giving away other people’s money: subsidizing new mortgages. The idea is that if you buy a house now, the government will chip in so that your 30 year fixed mortgage will only be 4.5%.

See, home prices got too high, causing a worldwide economic crisis, so the obvious solution is to make them high again! It’s kind of like if you are a manic-depressive pyromaniac and if during your latest manic phrase you made a bonfire out of all your money just to see the pretty flames burn high into the night. And now you are feeling really depressed, what with being broke and all, so the government is going to give you some more money to set fire to, plus a Zippo lighter, so you can feel happy again for awhile.

Henry George is rolling over in his grave — investing in land (which is what “housing” is — you have a very large consumer durable sitting on land), investing in land is not like investing in a manufacturing plant. As the real estate agents have been trying their best to make clear to us forever: land, they ain’t making anymore of it. Investing more money in, say, nuclear power gets us more nuclear power. Investing more money in land doesn’t get us anymore land.

Still, you can see the Carnival in Rio logic to this idea. After all, the U.S. government has plenty of money, at least in that Housing Bubble Era definition of “has” — “can currently borrow lots of money.” Everybody in the world is parking their money in U.S. Treasury bills right now because that seems like the safest place at the moment, what with the U.S. having the most ICBMS and carrier groups and what not.

Dr. Housing Bubble, however, asks what happens afterwards?

Well, interest rates eventually will be set by market forces. Mortgage rates are already at historical lows. So let us take a look at a poor sap that buys a home with a 4.5% 30 year fixed rate. In a few years when we have to face the repercussions of the squandering of our entire wealth in pathetic bailouts, rates will undoubtedly be higher since we are going to need to attract more capital to the U.S. since we are flat broke. So in the future, let us say rates go back to 6.5% the price of the home will need to reflect that. We are essentially screwing people once again and kicking the can down the road. This is patently insane. Let us examine a $300,000 home purchase at 4.5% with 20% down.At 4.5%, your monthly payment would only be about $1,220. Not bad!

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Hat Tip, one of our  VDARE.com readers for drawing my attention to a fine Anti-Southern Poverty Law Center column by baltimoresun.com’s columnist Ron Smith: The truth about ‘hate crimes’ and the racial justice racket December 3 2008

Noting a reverential reference in his own newspaper on Thanksgiving Day to the SPLC Thug-in-Chief Mark Potok, Smith says:

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a thriving business. The Alabama-based “nonprofit” firm has become a font of riches for founder Morris Dees and his associates. Its last tax return (2005) showed it took in nearly $111 million in donations the previous four years alone and reported assets of $189.4 million at the end of 2005.

Its business is fundraising, and its success at raking in the cash is based on its ability to sell gullible people on the idea that present-day America is awash in white racism and anti-Semitism

(Actually the SPLC, which like The VDARE Foundation has 501(c) (3) status, has just filed its 2006 IRS Form 990 [PDF]. Donations $29.3Mm, Endowment Income $4.5Mm “Gains” $10.1Mm, Total $44.7Mm. Expenses $29.9Mm of which $10.9Mm are employee costs. $213 Mm in assets, $184.2Mm in “Investments”, and $21.6Mm in Real Estate Assets (in Montgomery Alabama?!!!).

Our 990 will not look anything like this. The SPLC, with its trademark crude terrorism, hovers near intellectual bankruptcy - but not financial.

As John Derbyshire has phrased it, here is a Bleg: could some business-like VDARE.com reader look through these filings? This is the sort of thing we would love to do, given more resources. But help-in-kind is very valuable, too.

Ron Smith understands the SPLC:

the Southern Poverty Law Center is a clever scam, relentlessly cultivating for profit the fear that this nation is filled with Klansmen and rife with people eager to perpetrate genocide.

And he illustrates the savage bias of this entity by pointing out that the SPLC has totally ignored what Nicholas Stix called here “The Winchester Atrocity”, which Smith recounts in detail. He concludes:

“Hate crimes,” as trumpeted by the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center, are a questionable legal construct used almost exclusively against whites.

Hateful or not, interracial violent crime is overwhelmingly black on white or black on Asian. The Department of Justice’s figures show that between 2001 and 2003, blacks were 39 times more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than the reverse. Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.

You won’t hear about that from the Southern Poverty Law Center or see it on the evening newscasts, because the truth is one thing and the liberal agenda is another.

There is no attribution of the Winchester facts to VDARE.com . Doubtless this professional discourtesy was the price Ron Smith had to pay to get to write about the facts at all. The SPLC’s curse makes it very difficult for MSM writers to quote VDARE.com in any way. (He has, very bravely, had Nicholas Stix on his radio show.)

We don’t care. VDARE.com is at the top of the intellectual food chain. As Peter Brimelow has just said:

At VDARE.COM, our role is to create…“talking points” and make them available to patriots.

Ron Smith is such a patriot. Applaud him

Offer free plane and bus transportation back home to every illegal immigrant in the U.S. Being unemployed in Mexico is a lot cheaper for all concerned than being unemployed in the U.S.

Do it right now. We could call it the:

I’ll Be Home for Christmas plan

The government should set up booths at Greyhound stations. All an illegal immigrant has to do is walk in with his luggage, get fingerprinted and photographed, sign a legally binding document that he won’t be coming back and will go to jail if he does, and he’ll be on his way home on the next bus.

New Nobelist Paul Krugman blogs for the NYT today:

Worries about next year

I’ve been ruminating over economic prospects for next year, and I’m getting scared.

Two points:

1. The economy is falling fast. We’ll see what tomorrow’s employment report says, but we could well be losing jobs at a rate of 450,000 or 500,000 a month.

2. Infrastructure spending will take time to get going — a new Goldman Sachs report suggests that projects that are “shovel-ready” are probably only a few tens of billions worth, and that a larger effort would take much of a year to get going.

You don’t say!