Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham blew-up the internet yesterday when she said:
"...the America that we know and love doesn't exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people. ... Much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases legal immigration."
The culture-warrior left is en fuego. However, Ingraham is not wrong. America has changed fundamentally in the past several decades largely because immigration has grown too quickly for too long. It's now become a business unto itself. It's called lazy growth and lazy profit. By suppressing the median wage of the workforce, corporate profit as a share of GDP has grown to 1929 levels. Meanwhile, culture and ethnicity have changed at the same too-rapid pace. Too rapid to allow assimilation into the "Melting Pot".
Sadly, yet ironically, both sides of the political aisle never admit that immigration is fundamentally an economic calculation. The left doesn't want to admit that these new people are brought in to fund businesses and sectors that otherwise either would not exist, or be nearly as profitable e.g. construction, agriculture, fast food etc. Having wholesale abandoned their duty to protect the workforce, the left is now in bed with the corporate oligarchy to expand immigration under the auspice of social justice. Inadvertently suppressing wages across the entire working class while expanding profit to mind-boggling levels. The priority should be looking after the people inside the country, not the people outside the country. How many businessmen can continue to support Trump, simply because because the other side is advocating for open borders on their behalf?
The right doesn't want to admit that their beloved corporations are the ones doing their level best to swap them out with the cheapest labor they can find. Or preferably a machine financed with 0% poverty capital. Imagine how many business models would exist under slavery. Economists have failed us by believing that lower wages axiomatically imply higher productivity. When in the world we live in, lower wages merely mean the swapping out of a higher paid worker for a lower paid worker. The unit output is the exact same. Rinse and repeat over and over again, and the entire labor force suffers from underemployment. A surfeit of junk jobs with zero economic upside. Weeds where there once was a garden. Demand no longer equals supply, so paper it all over with astronomical amounts of debt and assiduously pretend that it's not all blowing up in our faces for the third time in a row. Good times.
The right doesn't want to admit that their beloved corporations are the ones doing their level best to swap them out with the cheapest labor they can find. Or preferably a machine financed with 0% poverty capital. Imagine how many business models would exist under slavery. Economists have failed us by believing that lower wages axiomatically imply higher productivity. When in the world we live in, lower wages merely mean the swapping out of a higher paid worker for a lower paid worker. The unit output is the exact same. Rinse and repeat over and over again, and the entire labor force suffers from underemployment. A surfeit of junk jobs with zero economic upside. Weeds where there once was a garden. Demand no longer equals supply, so paper it all over with astronomical amounts of debt and assiduously pretend that it's not all blowing up in our faces for the third time in a row. Good times.
Now, immigration is causing a schism within the Republican party itself. The party of corporate profit is somehow having to reconcile this newfound nationalism which is an attempt to go back to the long lost past.
The sub-title reads: "Are the Koch brothers going to be devoured by the very same radical forces that they helped spawn" In summary, the nationalist monster is off its leash. And the Koch Brothers who are champions of *free* trade (which has always been a U.S.-only fantasy), open borders, immigration, cheap labor, and corporate profit, are none too happy about it.
"the Koch brothers are the ones most responsible for promoting climate change denial. They did so by sowing doubt in the validity of all science. This categorical move has had remarkable spillover effects. It has led to questioning expertise and professionalism in general, in all spheres of American life. The upshot of this mindset, encouraged by the propaganda machine the Koch brothers financed, helped create the post-truth environment"
What both sides of the political spectrum don't want to admit, is that there is no going back to the "good old days". And there is also no going forward under the current paradigm. Both views are infantile fantasies.
The days of lazy growth are over. American mythology has now become an impediment to finding a new way forward.
