The lopsided law of immigration vs. Wall Street, humans actually do make it rain, and Glenn Beck goes after Google. These discoveries and more after the jump.
On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.
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Humans Make it Rain, Literally
Now, scientists have for the first time linked an increase in torrential rains and severe snowstorms over the past half-century to human tinkering with the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, reports the AP.
Undocumented Immigrants: 393K, Wall Street: 0
Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Thus far, no bankers or Wall Street executives have been tried, let alone put behind bars. Not a single one.
Glenn Beck Goes After Google
What does Glenn Beck want you to be scared of this week? Google! The former rodeo clown told viewers Wednesday that he’s afraid the search giant is in cahoots with governments (except the governments it’s trying to overthrow) and really just shouldn’t be trusted, no matter how good its search algorithm is.
Noam Chomsky on the World
Chomsky Talks on Wisconsin¹s Resistance to Assault on Public Sector, the Obama-Sanctioned Crackdown on Activists, and the Distorted Legacy of Ronald Reagan.
Why Students Want to Go to Harvard
Applications for the class of 2015 at elite colleges are soaring—up 15 percent at Harvard, and up 17, 11, 10, and 7 percent at Penn, Northwestern, Duke and Stanford, respectively. Why, amidst sluggish economic growth and high unemployment, are applications soaring at expensive elite schools, far more so than at mid-quality state universities and liberal-arts colleges?
China Cracks Down on Smoking
China is ordering makers of films and TV shows to limit the amount of smoking depicted on-screen, the latest effort to curb rampant tobacco use in the country with the largest number of smokers in the world.
Social Security Is Not Going Broke
The Economist’s Erica Grieder counters the argument that the program is a Ponzi scheme and unsustainable.
How to Build a Progressive Tea Party
Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind. Enraged citizens gather in every city, week after week—to demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes
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I would throw every person who worked on Wall Street for the past 10 years into Attica, seize their assets, and order the corrupt politicians who took money from them to pay the money back to the citizens of this country. How ironic that Wall Street can rob us blind and nobody does anything because Wall Street pays bribes to our politicians, and the Supreme court says that’s okay.
But as far as immigration goes, let’s back away from the cheap sentiment of “we’re all immigrants” and take a clear-eyed look at what’s going on. Do you know why we had the Chinese Exclusion Laws? Because cheap chinese labor was imported to build the railroads, and when the railroads were done, the Chinese immigrants moved into the coastal towns and took jobs for a fraction of what Americans were paid, throwing Americans out of work, all during the time of a national depression. American workers blamed the Chinese immigrants, when it was the politicians who were responsible. But the truth is that in every single context in our country’s history, immigration has been pushed by business and politicians to bust down working people, destroy the unions, and make the rich even richer.
We should stop being so weepy about illegal immigrants being deported. If they come here without inspection, they have no right to be here, no right to take an American’s job, no right to help the businesses in this country crush unions, working people and wages.
Look at the janitorial staff in L.A., previously union and largely black earning $12-14/hour, replaced by gangs of coyotes working directly to the property management and trucking in illegal immigrants who are paid $6/hour. I have nothing against the immigrants personally, but the fact is that this sneaky process has thrown a lot of Americans out of work and slashed the wages of a formerly decent-paying job. The same is true in construction, where carpenters used to make $18-$25/hour and were replaced with coyotes bringing in truckloads of illegal immigrants who work for $8/hour.
There is a good argument that all immigration should be halted until our own unemployment is down to 3% or less. Certainly, if we see the connection between flooding our country with labor and the destruction of the working people, then we should take steps to stop the flood. This necessarily includes deporting people who were never given permission to come here in the first place.
There is nothing inherently wrong with enforcing the immigration laws. The real crime here is in the businesses and the politicians they own cooperating in allowing our country to be flooded with cheap labor. The schools are being closed (Detroit) and privatized, the teachers fired and unions busted, and you just watch: within a few years they will be flying in schoolteachers from India or Pakistan or the Phillippines, just like they do the nurses, to permanently crush wages for teachers which, not coincidentally, was one of the few fields in this country in which women actually made a decent wage.
You don’t have to hate immigrants in order to see that we need to stop the flood of immigrant labor into this country, and deport the ones who are here illegally.
Guantanamo Prisoner’s Case Demonstrates Unfairness of Military Commissions
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By NABNYC, February 21, 2011 at 7:02 pm Link to this comment
I would throw every person who worked on Wall Street for the past 10 years into Attica, seize their assets, and order the corrupt politicians who took money from them to pay the money back to the citizens of this country. How ironic that Wall Street can rob us blind and nobody does anything because Wall Street pays bribes to our politicians, and the Supreme court says that’s okay.
But as far as immigration goes, let’s back away from the cheap sentiment of “we’re all immigrants” and take a clear-eyed look at what’s going on. Do you know why we had the Chinese Exclusion Laws? Because cheap chinese labor was imported to build the railroads, and when the railroads were done, the Chinese immigrants moved into the coastal towns and took jobs for a fraction of what Americans were paid, throwing Americans out of work, all during the time of a national depression. American workers blamed the Chinese immigrants, when it was the politicians who were responsible. But the truth is that in every single context in our country’s history, immigration has been pushed by business and politicians to bust down working people, destroy the unions, and make the rich even richer.
We should stop being so weepy about illegal immigrants being deported. If they come here without inspection, they have no right to be here, no right to take an American’s job, no right to help the businesses in this country crush unions, working people and wages.
Look at the janitorial staff in L.A., previously union and largely black earning $12-14/hour, replaced by gangs of coyotes working directly to the property management and trucking in illegal immigrants who are paid $6/hour. I have nothing against the immigrants personally, but the fact is that this sneaky process has thrown a lot of Americans out of work and slashed the wages of a formerly decent-paying job. The same is true in construction, where carpenters used to make $18-$25/hour and were replaced with coyotes bringing in truckloads of illegal immigrants who work for $8/hour.
There is a good argument that all immigration should be halted until our own unemployment is down to 3% or less. Certainly, if we see the connection between flooding our country with labor and the destruction of the working people, then we should take steps to stop the flood. This necessarily includes deporting people who were never given permission to come here in the first place.
There is nothing inherently wrong with enforcing the immigration laws. The real crime here is in the businesses and the politicians they own cooperating in allowing our country to be flooded with cheap labor. The schools are being closed (Detroit) and privatized, the teachers fired and unions busted, and you just watch: within a few years they will be flying in schoolteachers from India or Pakistan or the Phillippines, just like they do the nurses, to permanently crush wages for teachers which, not coincidentally, was one of the few fields in this country in which women actually made a decent wage.
You don’t have to hate immigrants in order to see that we need to stop the flood of immigrant labor into this country, and deport the ones who are here illegally.
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