Matthew Yglesias denounces the actions of class traitor Sidley Austin, Michelle Obama’s old law firm, in using the environmental laws to slow down environmentalists’ plans for that SWPL favorite, light rail. (Trolleys without right-of-ways are barely more efficient than buses, but SWPLs can imagine themselves taking a trolley, but they shudder at the thought of riding a bus with all those … uh, well, you know …)

One thing law firms do is take cases on a pro bono basis. You get some prestige for doing so, and it helps underscore the legal profession’s self-conception as serving the higher calling of the law. The general idea here, of course, is that you’re supposed to be helping out indigent clients or some kind of do-gooder causes.

Meanwhile, in DC’s Maryland suburbs we’re inching ever closer to actually starting work on the Purple Line light rail. This would connect several destinations that are already served by transit and walkable transit-oriented development, provide transit access to the University of Maryland’s main campus, and also create the possibility of new transit-oriented development at additional stops along the way. It’s a good idea that will help reduce congestion on the Beltway, reduce carbon emissions, and enhance the region’s ability to keep growing in a sustainable manner. Every environmental group in the city is for it. But a group of NIMBYs centered around the town of Chevy Chase, MD and the Columbia Country Club are trying to block it in order to keep the riffraff out and are offering some spurious environmental claims to try to block construction.

They’ve engaged the large DC firm of Sidley Austin to help them in their fight. And Sidley’s doing the work pro bono — for free — as charity. No doubt in part this is because Joseph Guerra is both a partner in the firm and the husband of the woman co-chairing the NIMBY effort. Perhaps some of the firms partners are members of the Country Club as well. Who knows? But this is certainly a strange definition of charitable work. They might want to ask some of the people working for the firm on the bottom rungs — the janitors and so forth — if they really appreciate these kind of “charitable” efforts to deny poor people any better commuting options than the bus?

Why can’t Sidley Austin figure out that environmental laws are only supposed to slow down bad people, like conservative developers, but not nice liberal people who are trying to build stuff that Matthew Yglesias wants?

Progressives didn’t spend 40 years setting up a vast web of environmental and other land use regulations that make it glacially slow to build anything on either coast in order to hurt progressives. Therefore, environmental laws should _not_ apply to progressives. Any law firm that uses environmental laws to frustrate Matthew Yglesias’s desires is a traitor and should be dealt with. As Lenin said, the eternal question is always “Who? Whom?”

Bulldoze, baby, bulldoze!

You can’t have a bunch of environmentalist red tape holding back Yglesias’s Robert Moses-like ambitions to bulldoze anything standing in the way of his vision of a better future. Now that progressives have power, they must deregulate the environment so nobody can slow down their efforts to save the environment.

We have to bulldoze the environment to save it!

And while they’re at it, progressives should deregulate all the affirmative action minority set-aside contract regulations that slow infrastructure construction so badly.

The Obama Stimulus Plan is out.

Sadly, here is no recovery plan for most VDARE.com readers. The arithmetic is pretty clear. Basically what is touted as a “recovery” doesn’t keep up with immigration and growth of the workforce-and the “grand plan” is to wind up in 2014 with a higher unemployment rate than we had in 2007–after years of Bush’s mismanagement of the economy–and after continued high rates of immigration.

The Obama Stimulus plan is getting cheers from Open Borders Radicals like Bernanke.

The basic assumption of the Keynesian approach to the business cycle is to “even things out”
over time-it doesn’t really deal with a situation in which there are fundamental structural problems with an economy. Even Corporate Media like Reuters is starting to realize , we are heading into another great Depression.

Or are we? Figures collected for Reuters by John Williams, from the electronic newsletter Shadowstats.com, suggest that, while we are not there yet, the comparison is not as outlandish as it might initially seem.

By his count, if unemployment were still tallied the way it was in the 1930s, today’s jobless rate would be closer to 16.5 percent — more than double the stated rate.

“I expect that unemployment in the current downturn, which will be particularly deep and protracted, eventually will rival, if not top, the 25 percent seen in the Great Depression,” Williams said.[Great Depression jobs parallel may not be far flung,
By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, January 8, 2009]

Williams material is interesting. I would in particular point to this explanation of his employment calculations.

However, the real figure we want to look at over time is how things are changing for a specific population. Immigration and importation of guest workers complicates these statistics significantly because unemployment among those pools of workers often means repatriation. Guest workers and illegal immigrants sometimes work jobs that can’t sustain their living expenses in hopes of getting a green card someday.

If we either look at the changes of the pool of workers present in the US in 2000 or say changes in citizen employment levels, things are worse than that 16.5% figure would indicate. What I would like to look at is what percentage of citizens are employed at sustainable jobs that involve actual ability to accumulate some long term savings. Beyond that 16.5% figure, we have a large block of citizens that are employed at work they can’t sustain in an attempt bankruptcy since during the bush administration bankruptcy was made a rather unattractive option.

What needs to be done is to look at the fundamentals of the US economy and the international economic order. The US economy might be said to be recovering when a smaller portion of the citizenry have zero or negative assets–and fewer assets are concentrated in the hands of the top 1% of the population. We need a situation in which jobs for citizens are growing faster than the natural increase of US citizens and the US trade deficit is balanced-or at least associated with capital investments in the US. I don’t think any of those things will happen without a major technological revolution and structural change of the US economy on a par with the industrial revolution. Change in this case needs to be more than a slogan.

An outpost of Mexico and its colorful culture has established itself in the Salinas Valley, bringing the full Monte of varied social customs, including slavery and pedophilia.

A Mexican illegal alien in Greenfield, California, arranged to sell his 14-year-old daughter to a neighbor for cash and beer. Was he not aware that slavery is illegal in America?

And when Macelino de Jesus Martinez did not receive payment, he went to the police to complain. Apparently local Mexes can forget that they no longer live in the dear homeland, though in some areas of society, American law still prevails. [Father Accused Of Selling Daughter For Beer, KSBW, Jan 12, 2009]

A father is accused of trying to sell his 14-year-old daughter for marriage in hopes of getting money and 150 cases of beer in return, Greenfield police said.

Macelino de Jesus Martinez, 36, was arrested Monday on suspicion of trying to arrange to have his daughter marry Margarito de Jesus Galindo, 18, for $16,000, 100 cases of Corona, 50 cases of Modelo beer, several cases of meat, two cases of wine, 50 cases of Gatorade and 50 cases of soft drinks, authorities said.

The girl moved in with Galindo and when payments were not received, her father called police to get his daughter back.

Greenfield Police Chief Joe Grebmeier told KSBW Action News 8 that both Martinez and Galindo, who are immigrants from Mexico, face the possibility of being deported as illegal immigrants.

Grebmeier also said that both men didn’t fully understand that what they were doing was wrong.

Also, the girl told police that she willingly moved in with Galindo.

Arranged marriages are common in the section of Mexico where both Galindo and Martinez are from. [Ed: Oaxaca]

But California law prohibits arranged marriage where one or both of the parties have been coerced.

Local reporting from KION included remarks of a police officer who said that he had heard of “girls as young as 12 or 10, buyers in their 50s or 60s.”

Mexican piggyman behavior is not new to Greenfield. In 2001, the INS was brought in to stop a disturbing case where girls were subjected to daily sexual harassment as they walked home from school: Mass INS Arrests Upset Farm Town [San Francisco Chronicle, April 10, 2001]

After an undercover operation begun several weeks ago, INS agents arrested 21 men outside a downtown pool hall on Friday afternoon, and 18 more in a nearby apartment building.

The first group of men, according to the INS, were “observed harassing, touching and shouting lewd remarks at schoolgirls just out of class” at four nearby schools — Greenfield and Oak Avenue elementary schools, Vista Verde Middle School and Greenfield High School.

The second group was arrested after a complaint was registered by a Greenfield schoolgirl, said INS spokeswoman Sharon Rummery. She said the alleged incidents were observed over several weeks.

The girls involved were between 5 and 18, Rummery said. The men arrested were aged 17 to 55.

So it goes in Mexifornia, where the arc of history now bends toward the reversal of progress.

The website for the new book by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000-Year Explosion, includes “deleted scenes“ — chunks of text that were dropped for reasons of space. Some are digressions, such as Henry’s encounter with the charging cape buffalo, while others consist of fairly well-known background info, but are worth reading for the level of insight that you won’t find in other works. Here’s one subsection of a long essay, “Prelude,” on the various traits that evolved at some point since humans broke off from apes. I’ll just highlight the section on how well humans get along with members of their own sex. Personally, I have two fluffy bunnies living in the backyard, two neutered male rabbits who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but we have to keep them separated like the Israelis and Palestinians with a series of fences to keep them from ripping each other to shreds.

Groups of pair bonds - Some primates form durable mating male-female pairs, but the only ape to do so is the gibbon. Other arrangements like harems or troops are more common both among larger primates and among mammals in general.

In a harem there is one reproducing adult of one sex and more than one of the other sex. Gorillas and hamadryas baboons are mostly organized into one-male harems. African Cape Dogs live in one-female harems with a number of males that are related to each other. Troops contain adult reproductive individuals of both sexes, among whom there may be complex competitive games and strategies to achieve access to the other sex. Common baboons live in troops as do chimpanzees. The baboon troop, like troops of most mammals, is predominately a matrilineage, related females, while the males have entered the troop from another troop. Chimpanzee troops, on the other hand, are patrilineages, groups of related males, with females having come from elsewhere. Chimpanzee troops are ordinarily dispersed over a large territory while the more familiar usage of “troop” refers to a group that moves together.

Durable male-female pairs usually live away from other pairs, and when they do join larger groups, they are members of a flock, not involved or minimally involved in social interactions with others of the flock. Almost all the social interaction is between members of the pair. Animals in harems or troops, on the other hand, spend most of their time in same-sex interactions. Ordinarily these would be some variant of social competition for food among females and competition for females among males.

Humans, remarkably, have the ability to maintain durable pair bonds with reproductive exclusivity while living in larger social groups in which most of the day to day social interaction is with members of the same sex (Rodseth et al., 1991). Gibbons almost certainly could not do it: males are intolerant of the presence of other males and females of other females. Something special and now occurred in human evolution the led to our peculiar capacity to maintain pair bonds embedded in larger social groups.

Since the cost and the environmental impact of a construction project don’t matter anymore as long as Barack Obama is for it, here’s a green infrastructure plan expensive enough even for Paul Krugman’s taste: The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA):

Let’s generate huge amounts of carbon-free hydroelectric power and turn the western half of the USA green (in the literal sense) by diverting a small fraction of the water from Canada’s vast but almost-useless rivers that flow north into the Arctic Ocean. While we’re at it, we can turn northern Mexico green, too. (Here’s a promotional video from the 1960s.) Thayer Watkins writes:

The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) is a project for diverting to the western U.S. and northwestern Mexico water from rivers in Alaska and Canada which now flow into the Arctic Ocean. In addition to providing irrigation water to arid parts of North America NAWAPA would also generate considerable amounts of power and provide some subsidiary benefits such as stabilizing the level of the Great Lakes. The project was formulated by the Los Angeles engineering firm of Ralph M. Parsons Company and got some attention in Congress, particularly from Senator Frank Moss of Utah, but is not politically feasible.

(more…)

Obama created a new position called the “Chief Performance Officer” (CPO). Obama chose Nancy Killefer as his CPO. Killefer’s role as the nation’s new CPO isn’t very clear but there are endless numbers of articles on the internet that speculate on what she will do if you care to slog through them.

I haven’t had time to really dig into Killefer, but what is known so far about her is not very encouraging, especially considering that Obama has stacked his administration with dregs of the Clinton administration who are advocates of expanded immigration and “free trade”. Whatever influence Killefer has it sure won’t be to help American workers keep their jobs.

Nancy Killefer has an MBA and a BA in economics. If that’s not enough to make you nervous, she was manager at the Treasury and IRS. BLECH! Killefer is a senior director for McKinsey & Company and has been there since 1979. McKinsey is a large consultancy agency and had for clients companies that went bankrupt; like Enron, Swiss-air, Kmart, and Global Crossing.[Personality Spotlight: Nancy Killefer, UPI, January 7, 2009]

McKinsey could be characterized many ways, but for the most part they are a bodyshop that companies use to outsource management functions. They have offshore offices all over the world. They also publish sham studies that are widely quoted. Their studies appear to be academic and objective but are mostly self-serving calls for more offshoring and to allow more H-1B visas.

McKinsey’s CEO is Rajat Gupta who is known as the first India-born CEO of billion dollar US transnational. You can read all about Rajat in this 1994 article: The Superboss By Sreenath Sreenivasan, Business Today,April 22, 1994.

There are simply too many outrageous things that McKinsey has said to cover in this newsletter but here are some nuggets of wisdom that the McKinsey Global Institute published in a report called Offshoring: Is it a win-win game? [August, 2003.] Somebody should ask Killefer if she believes this trash but we can count on the mainstream media to treat her with kid gloves.

• “Offshoring creates wealth for U.S. companies and consumers and therefore for the United States as a whole.”
• Offshoring saves U.S. companies, on average, 58 cents for every dollar spent overseas, thereby increasing productivity, profitability and competitiveness.
• For every dollar spent offshoring, U.S. service providers purchase an additional 5 cents worth of U.S. goods and services, which create U.S. jobs.
• Global outsourcing frees up U.S. labor to engage in work the market determines is more productively performed in America. “Far from being bad for the United States, offshoring creates net additional value for the U.S. economy that did not exist before.

For more on McKinsey this is an excellent article: Inside McKinsey |Enron isn’t its only client to melt down. Suddenly, times are trying for the world’s most prestigious consultant, BusinessWeek,
July 8, 2002.

This video shows Obama introducing Nancy Killefer: