Mickey Kaus reports, (scroll down one item)

Jobs Americans Won’t Will Do: A WSJ report contradicts two pieces of pro-legalization CW:

1) ‘Crops will rot in the fields without legalization and a “guest worker” program’: Not this year–

Growers across the country are reporting that farmhands are plentiful; in fact, they are turning down potential field workers.

2) ‘Non-immigrant Americans just won’t do tough, dirty jobs like agricultural field work and day labor’ Not any more–

In particular, Mr. Gray has observed an influx of U.S.-born Latinos and other workers who previously shunned field work. “These are domestic workers who appear to be displacing immigrants,” says Mr. Gray.

A similar situation has emerged in U.S. cities from New York to Los Angeles, where unemployed, nonimmigrant laborers are seeking informal work that typically has been performed by low-skilled immigrants …

In particular, Mr. Gray has observed an influx of U.S.-born Latinos and other workers who previously shunned field work. “These are domestic workers who appear to be displacing immigrants,” says Mr. Gray.

A similar situation has emerged in U.S. cities from New York to Los Angeles, where unemployed, nonimmigrant laborers are seeking informal work that typically has been performed by low-skilled immigrants …

Kaus has more, but all you need to know is that the report was titled U.S. Workers Crowding Out Immigrant Laborers , [By Miriam Jordan, (Emaiil her) December 20, 2008] Wrap your mind around that headline for a few moments. We have VDAWDI–the VDARE.com American Worker Displacement Index. Is the WSJ going to come up with the WSJIADI–the Wall Street Journal Illegal Alien Displacement Index?

From The Forward, the New York Jewish newspaper:

What Sort of Man? Madoff on the Couch

By Marissa Brostoff
Thu. Dec 18, 2008

In Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice,” Shylock, the usurious lender, attains the status of literature’s classic antisemitic stereotype, in part because of his relentless preying upon non-Jews.

But the victims devastated by Bernard Madoff, the investment guru charged with running an alleged Ponzi scheme that blew through $50 billion of other people’s money, were primarily his own.

In this, say observers looking at the case through a psychological lens, Madoff achieved a wholly different level of notoriety.

“Hitherto, all ethnic groups who ascended into a national class of benefactors made their wealth off other ethnic groups,” said Nelson W. Aldrich, author of the 1996 book “Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America.” “They soaked the Irish or sued the French Canadians. They wouldn’t dream of doing what Madoff did.”

This is not to say that Madoff excluded non-Jews from his ruinous scheme. Several large European banks and other non-Jewish institutions and individuals lost millions, even billions, through their investments with Madoff. But in interviews with the Forward, mental health experts agreed that from a psychological point of view, Madoff’s exploitation of his vast Jewish network of friends — many of them close — and acquaintances to bring investors into his alleged Ponzi scheme constituted a level of behavior verboten even as criminal actions go.

“He might have violated a primitive rule against hurting your own tribe,” said Ira Moses, director of Clinical Services at the William Alanson White Institute, a psychoanalytic training center. “He may have broken a taboo amongst criminals.” …

The novelist Nathan Englander said that he generally has no patience for the idea that Jewish misdeeds will stoke antisemitism. But he said that the Madoff scandal — with its long lists of bilked Jewish charities and individuals covered in major newspapers — embarrassed even him.

“It really raises up for me this primal thing of, ‘This is the kind of thing that looks bad in a general Jewish way,’” Englander told the Forward. “It gave me that ‘circle the wagon’ mentality that I don’t have very often.”

Yet this kind of betrayal from inside a community is not unheard of — there is even a name for it: affinity fraud — but it is unusual.

How Madoff might have justified to himself his exploitation of his own community — in which he was not only a major philanthropist, but also actively engaged in an elite country club scene in Palm Beach, Fla., and New York — would depend on the extent to which he believed his own lies, psychologists said.

Had Madoff deluded himself into believing that his scheme could go on forever, he actually might have seen his victims as beneficiaries, psychoanalyst and Yale professor Dori Laub pointed out.

“It’s possible that what we’re dealing with is a man who’s essentially depressed and as a compensation begins to feel some omnipotence to fight the emptiness,” Laub said. “If you end up really being the messiah, you’ll be glorified.”

At the other end of the spectrum, some psychologists posited that unconscious hostility toward the Jewish community may have provoked him to choose his victims as he did. Noah Shaw, who has studied the psychology of money, said that he had worked with patients who generalized their hostile feelings toward their own family into antagonism directed at their ethnic community.

Stephen Rittenberg, a former director of treatment at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute who collaborated with Shaw on his research, had a similar assessment.

“If he were my patient I would try to address that aspect: Was there some kind of psychological hatred of his own family, his own community?” Rittenberg said.

But Shaw speculated as well that Madoff may have given his victims little thought at all and chose them simply because the Jewish community was the group most accessible to him.

“When people have feelings of inferiority or inadequacy, they need to beat the system, to outsmart the rules,” he said. “It works in an extremely temporary way. It’s the psychological mirror of a Ponzi scheme: If you don’t keep doing it, you collapse.”

Madoff’s motives are further obscured by the fact that there is something suicidal about the very structure of a Ponzi scheme, which has no way of working indefinitely.

“Maybe the ‘deal’ with Madoff is that on some deep level he’s not able to believe that the future exists,” said Rivka Galchen, author of this year’s novel “Atmospheric Disturbances” and a trained psychiatrist herself. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night for pretty much the majority of his professional life.”

Or maybe, like Willie Sutton and banks, Madoff robbed Jews because that’s where the money is.

In general, minority in-group morality as applied to business ethics rests on the assumption that most potential victims belong to the out-group. Gypsies, for example, tend to believe that driveway repair scams are morally okay because the great majority of the driveways in the world belong to non-Gypsies. But what if Gypsies got incredibly successful and ended up owning a sizable fraction of all the driveways in the world? Then they might wake up one morning to shocking headlines about how one Gypsy had scammed lots of other Gypsies out of billions.

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Has anybody noticed how out of date Obama’s automobile industry rhetoric is? He’s still talking about cars as if gas was over $4 per gallon and global warming was the imminent threat, rather than global depression. He keeps talking about how Detroit has to stop making big pickup trucks and start making little runabouts. That kind of mindless rhetoric is killing Detroit, which makes profits on big hulks and loses money on go-karts.

If Obama wants the Detroit car companies to actually earn some cash flow and keep workers employed over the next 2-3 years, then the government should take major steps to solve consumers’ big worries about buying from the (not-so) Big Three:

1. Figure out a way to guarantee Detroit’s seven year warranties so even if they go out of business, new buyers can still get the cars serviced under warranty. They’ll be a lot less likely to go out of business if customers don’t have to worry about them going out of business.

2. Guarantee that new buyers won’t pay gas prices over, say, $2.75 per gallon during the next 2 or 3 years, through a tax rebate or whatever.

3. The President of the United States of America should stop demonizing the most profitable products made by American car companies. Stop pretending that “green” cars are going to rescue Detroit. Admit that all the SWPL green stuff was just a load of campaign hooey that is now “inoperative.”

If the government can lift those clouds of uncertainty from would-be customers minds, then Detroit could move a lot of metal.

But, Obama won’t because:

A. This is all about the class struggle.

B. Obama loves power. Helping American businesses and consumers make mutually satisfactory transactions is not as much fun for him as forcing both of them to make and (not) buy cars that they (and, for that matter, Obama himself, whose last car weighed 4,000 pounds) don’t want.

From the Sunday, 12/21/08 New York Times:

White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire

By JO BECKER, SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and STEPHEN LABATON

“We can put light where there’s darkness, and hope where there’s despondency in this country. And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home.” — President Bush, Oct. 15, 2002

That, of course, as my readers (but practically nobody else’s) know, was at the White House Conference on Minority Homeownership

… “How,” [Bush] wondered aloud, “did we get here?”

Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr. Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, “faced with the prospect of a global meltdown” with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed.

There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk.

But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.

From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.

He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

Mr. Bush did foresee the danger posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants. The president spent years pushing a recalcitrant Congress to toughen regulation of the companies, but was unwilling to compromise when his former Treasury secretary wanted to cut a deal. And the regulator Mr. Bush chose to oversee them — an old prep school buddy — pronounced the companies sound even as they headed toward insolvency.

… “The Bush administration took a lot of pride that homeownership had reached historic highs,” Mr. Snow said in an interview. “But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost.”For much of the Bush presidency, the White House was preoccupied by terrorism and war; on the economic front, its pressing concerns were cutting taxes and privatizing Social Security. The housing market was a bright spot: ever-rising home values kept the economy humming, as owners drew down on their equity to buy consumer goods and pack their children off to college.

Lawrence B. Lindsay, Mr. Bush’s first chief economics adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Mr. Bush meet housing goals.

“No one wanted to stop that bubble,” Mr. Lindsay said. “It would have conflicted with the president’s own policies.”

Today, millions of Americans are facing foreclosure, homeownership rates are virtually no higher than when Mr. Bush took office, Fannie and Freddie are in a government conservatorship, and the bailout cost to taxpayers could run in the trillions. …

But in private moments, aides say, the president is looking inward. During a recent ride aboard Marine One, the presidential helicopter, Mr. Bush sounded a reflective note.

“We absolutely wanted to increase homeownership,” Tony Fratto, his deputy press secretary, recalled him saying. “But we never wanted lenders to make bad decisions.”

Darrin West could not believe it. The president of the United States was standing in his living room.

It was June 17, 2002, a day Mr. West recalls as “the highlight of my life.” Mr. Bush, in Atlanta to unveil a plan to increase the number of minority homeowners by 5.5 million, was touring Park Place South, a development of starter homes in a neighborhood once marked by blight and crime.

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Once again, a Washington Post reporter asks Team Obama how they are going to keep from wasting the hundreds of billions of “stimulus” dollars by spending it too fast and Team Obama replies that they are going to work hard to not spend it too slow:

Because they are intended to pump cash quickly into the economy, stimulus measures are released from the usual budgetary constraints that require the cost of new programs to be covered by cutting spending elsewhere or by raising taxes — a one-time pass that could invite lawmakers to load the bill up with favored items.

[Larry] Summers and other Obama advisers said they are keenly aware of the problem and are working to convince lawmakers of the wisdom of limiting the package to projects that would create a large number of jobs quickly or make a down payment on Obama’s broader economic goals, such as improving the health-care system or reducing emissions that contribute to global warming.

“While this may be Christmastime, it doesn’t mean there’s going to be a large number of unrelated ornaments under the Christmas tree,” Summers said. “There’s a commitment by all of us to discipline and to doing the right things in terms of accountability.”

Summers said Obama’s budget team is “scrubbing” various proposals for “basic soundness.” The team also is developing ideas to make expenditures transparent to the public, perhaps through regular progress reports or even Internet sites where “people could monitor the fraction of each project that had been spent out,” he said.

Does the term “spent out” connote to you a deep concern for making sure the taxpayers get their money’s worth?

Almost a month after Brenda Walker noted the issue of Somali communities in America exporting recruits to Islamic war bands, The Wall Street Journal has woken up and run a story about it: FBI Probes Terrorism Links in U.S. Somali Enclaves Evan Perez December 20, 2008

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is following the trail of more than a dozen young men missing from Somali communities in several U.S. cities, including Minneapolis, Boston and Columbus, Ohio, according to people familiar with the probe…

Families of three teenagers earlier this month went public in Minneapolis, home to the largest Somali enclave in the U.S., saying their teenagers had disappeared in recent months and then turned up in Somalia… One of them is believed to have…(commited) the first suicide bombing carried out by an American, according to U.S. law-enforcement officials….

E.K. Wilson, an FBI special agent in the bureau’s Minneapolis office, said …the FBI is aware that “a number of young Somali men from throughout the United States have left, potentially to fight with terrorist groups.”

The Somalis, as I remarked earlier this year, are shaping up as the most dysfunctional human import since the Hmong. Worse, in fact, because of their arrogant insistence that America adapt to them. The VDARE.com archive on them is packed with horror stories.

So what motivated the WSJ to publish an extremely unusual negative story on an Immigrant group? Not the views or safety of native born Americans, of course . In classic Neoconservative style, when America’s ability to influence the Middle East is threatened, all other priorities are subordinated. With American encouragement

two years ago…troops from neighboring Ethiopia…ousted an Islamist government that U.S. officials say was allied with al Qaeda. Ethiopia has said it plans to withdraw, which would likely make way for the loose coalition of Islamist insurgents threatening to retake the central government’s seat in Mogadishu.

Sadly, the WSJ’s fatuous open borders mania lives on. They are not about to ask Stephen Steinlight’s highly cogent question: Is the immigration of fanatical Muslims wise? Much of the article is spent grasping for consolation because some Somalis show slight signs of co operating with the authorities.

Ask Evan Perez why America needs Somalis?