posted by Damozel | IN WHICH Bill O'Reilly Sounds the Alarm Against the Decline of "The White Christian Power Structure."
Can I be truthful? I love Fox News. I would be happy to write about nothing else but, if News Hounds didn't already have that niche pretty much covered. Other people find Fox firightening; but I just laugh and laugh. Liberals---of which I am one, but with the advantage of being blue-state born and raised---think Fox exists to present a particular viewpoint and to influence viewers; I think its mission is instead to mirror what its viewers already think.. Its pundits, such as they are, have gained fame and fortune by articulating a particular point of view so its viewing audience doesn't have to. And right now, those people need Fox.
These are desperate times for Fox viewers. I mean, come on, Trent Lott actually praised Ted Kennedy for his work on Bush's immigration bill. ""He is the number one boogeyman for conservative Republicans," Lott said later of the longtime Democratic senator from Massachusetts. But, Lott added, "he is a good legislator, and you can't take that away from him."" [Ted Kennedy Gets a Little Republican Respect, The Washington Post by Elizabeth Williamson (30 May 2007)].
And you know things are desperate indeed when in an an interview on Fox News on Wednesday Bill O'Reilly asked interviewee John McCain to assent to the following proposition:
"Do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far left want? They want to break down the white Christian male power structure of which you are part, and so am I." [The Raw Story, O'Reilly Fears End of "White Christian Power Structure] And if you walk a mile in O'Reilly's shoes, you can see why this would alarm him; after all, if that were to happen, who would watch Fox News?
You can see the video here, if you want, though of course everyone's known what O'Reilly thinks ever since the historic shoutfest with Geraldo Rivera. [O'Riled Up: Geraldo and Rivera Have a Brawl, The Washington Post by Howard Kurtz (7 April 2007); compare Anarchy and Illegal Immigration, Fox News by Bill O'Reilly (10 April 2007).
Which doubtless is the reason why O'Reilly allies himself with the Main Street Republicans against Bush and theWall Street Republicans and captains of industry (which is who he ought to be attacking rather than "the left." It isn't as if Fox News viewers aren't aware that they've been (as they see it) betrayed. Many griefstricken Republicans have evidently broken up with McCain over his position on immigration.
Yes, it's the epic battle between the rich and powerful and sophisticated (in its original sense ) and the provincial and pedestrian and slightly paranoid, and I can't really scrape up much sympathy for either, though I'm enjoying the fray from my seat on the sidelines The Main Street Republicans are afraid that their "way of life" will be disrupted and their party overrun; the Wall Street Republicans---driven really by the same fear--- are filled with anxiety lest they lose the cheap, cheap labor and excellent household help.
Meanwhile, all of them blame the undocumented workers for the problem when the problem is so clearly the fact that people need them to do the back-breaking, tedious jobs like harvesting tobacco. [Can A Guest Worker Program Work?, Time by Nathan Thornburgh (24 May 2007)]
I don't understand the disdain for the workers. The life of a migrant worker, documented or -un, has never been easy.. Setting aside the novels of John Steinbeck, there are plenty of real life stories about hardships endured by immigrants who take jobs under circumstances better left unimagined by the squeamish. In 1983, the North Carolina legislature actually saw the need to pass a bill to protect migrant workers from "being held in involuntary servitude."
[quote begins from The New York Times, North Carolina Passes AntiSlavery Bill to Aid Farm Migrants]
Sponsors of the legislation, which was passed by voice vote as the 1983 session neared its end, said they expected law-enforcement officials to use the statute to attack a century-old system by which state farmers have secured a cheap labor supply composed primarily of migrant farm workers.
The bill, which makes slavery punishable by five years in prison, was strongly opposed by farm interests and has been extensively rewritten since it was introduced in April. Since 1980, 10 of the 21 Federal slavery convictions have been in North Carolina, where it is estimated that 35,000 migrant workers are used to pick crops. Farm labor crew bosses have been found guilty of practicing slavery by withholding the workers' generally low wages and charging exorbitant rates for housing, food, liquor and cigarettes. 'Debt Peonage' Is Cited.
[quote ends]
Nowadays, of course, an article in last week's TIME shows, North Carolina now has what you could call a model guest worker program. There's just one small drawback: nobody seems very happy with it, even though the program is "orderly, rational, legal.".
[quote begins from Can A Guest Worker Program Work?, Time by Nathan Thornburgh (24 May 2007)]
Here, in a retrofitted hangar in the heart of tobacco country, is an early glimpse of what life could be like if the recent Senate compromise on immigration passes. Two busloads of tobacco workers, fresh from the Mexican state of Nayarít, are met and ministered to by a cadre of social and health workers, a federal agent from the Department of Labor, even a union organizer......[The] North Carolina Growers Association [is] the organization that brought them from Mexico. They are...driven to farms scattered across the state, where they will spend the summer months picking tobacco before heading back to Mexico.North Carolina, which imports more legal farmworkers than any other state, offers an idea of how the guest-worker proposal might look in action. During the past growing season, I canvassed the state....and found a guest-worker program that is orderly, rational, legal--and almost completely unworkable as it currently exists.
"The system is collapsing from within," is how Stan Eury, director of the North Carolina Growers Association, puts it.... Employers complain about the spiraling costs of wages, transportation, government fees and housing. Activists worry about exploitation. Economists say guest-worker programs may look like a flexible solution to the nation's seasonal agricultural needs, but they inevitably grow rigid under a tangle of red tape.
[quote ends; cf. ]
I don't know what the solution is (except people need to stop blaming the workers for wanting to work), but being born and bred in the Carolinas I know that this New York Times article from July of last year asks a key question. It's a question that the Main Street Republicans, who clearly don't know jack about the realities of agriculture or industry, need to ask themselves: Who will work the farms? [Eduardo Porter, The New York Times (March 23, 2006)]
In the plainspoken manner common to her fellow farmers, Faylene Whitaker has a message for members of Congress struggling to overhaul the nation's immigration law.
We would rather use legal workers," said Ms. Whitaker, who grows tobacco, tomatoes and other crops on the 500-acre farm she and her husband own in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. But "if we don't get a reasonable guest worker program we are going to hire illegals."....
Some lawmakers are talking about erecting a high wall along the entire 2,000-mile border separating the United States from Mexico. Others are pushing to declare all immigrants here illegally felons who would never be allowed to take up legal residence in the United States.
But as long as the government looks the other way while employers are allowed to fill their demands for cheap labor from a deep pool of foreigners desperate to find work, hundreds of thousands more are expected to manage one way or another to cross the border illegally every year in search of jobs.
"If there is a need for workers, they will find a way in, if you don't have a method for satisfying the legitimate needs of American employers," said Senator Arlen Specter, Republican from Pennsylvania and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which has been trying to hammer out a new immigration bill to present to the full Senate as early as next Monday.
[quote ends; links in original, including the one explaining what "the United States" is; emphasis mine]
People like Bill O'Reilly---or the people for whom he stands in loco, uh....? Well, let's just say in loco---are clearly blinded by the same fear that our ancestors felt toward people named, say, O'Reilly in the days of "No Irish Need Apply." They were here to destroy our way of life by turning us all into Catholics (how I don't know).
But O'Reilly's xenophobia is at least in part politically motivated, though his beliefs about what "the left" wants don't necessarily resemble the views of any lefty I know. He must know some other kinds. His exchange with McCain was interesting because the two were so clearly talking at cross-purposes.
[quote begins from O'Reilly Fears End of "White Christian Power Structure (quoting from The O'Reilly Factor transcript]
Now on the left. The objection is there's not enough illegal aliens in here. The New York Times wants open borders. They want all the 12 million legal people who will be legalized to bring in their extended families. Not just wives and children, but moms and dads, brothers and sisters.This would lead to in my calculation 40 and 50 foreign nationals being absorbed into the United States in the next 12, 13 years. That would sink the Republican Party, I believe, because we'd have a one-party system. And change, pardon the pun, the whole complexion of America. Am I wrong?
MCCAIN: No, you're right. The second thing that are on the left they're against is the temporary worker, as you know. We say two years go back for a year, two years, go back for a year. They don't want that. They don't want them to have to go back....In America today, we have a very strong economy, low unemployment. So we need additional farm workers, including by the way, agriculture. But there may come a time where we have an economic downturn and we don't need so many.[quote (emphasis mine)]
You're right! You're left! You're right, left, right...! Okay, sorry; I said at the outset that Fox always amuses the hell out of me; I just can't take this stuff seriously; I just get giddy. I mean consider this:
[quote begins from O'Reilly Fears End of "White Christian Power Structure (quoting from The O'Reilly Factor transcript]
O'REILLY: Do you understand — and I'm not saying this in a condescending way, you're smarter than I am.
MCCAIN: Sure.
The raw story people get exercised because McCain didn't challenge O'Reilly on the "complexion of America"/"white power structure" language. Failing to do so strikes me as impolitic, even for a Republican. But I'm not prepared to draw any dire conclusions about anyone who goes on Fox News to try to explain an agenda to Bill O'Reilly that he doesn't approve of. .
Anyway. I do think it's understandable that we non-Republicans would be watching the rupture within the party with incredulous glee, particularly since we understand perfectly well the motives of Bush and his supporters. And, hey, I can't help it if I enjoy seeing an angry, angry Bush enjoining his own party "to do what's right for America." You go, W!
And I also can't help enjoying the grieved reaction---though they are much, much more angry than hurt---from all those Republicans dissenters. Ana Marie Cox: "And all the President did was accuse opponents of the immigration bill of not "want[ing] to do what's right for America." Imagine if he, oh let's just say, accused them of aiding the terrorists? Or said, "Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists." That'd be wrong." [I Have Nothing to Add, Swampland at TIME by Ana Marie Cox (30 May 2007)] It's unkind I know. But nothing makes schadenfreude more delicious than reflecting on the all the times when the shoe was very on the other foot.
At The Washington Post, Shannon O'Neill, a fellow in Latin American studies at the Council for Foreign Relations. has written a piece on immigration reform. I am guessing that O'Neill is the sort of person McCain and O'Reilly meant when they referred to people ("the left") who want to let everyone in Mexico move to America. In his "discussion" with O'Reilly, McCain stressed that we need workers now, but suggested that we might not in the future. In her opinion piece, O'Neill explains why this is not really a very likely projection. In pertinent part, she states
[quote begins from The Fundamental Flaws in Immigration Reform, The Washington Post by Shannon O'Neill (1 June 2007)]
Any reform that does not consider both the institutional infrastructure governing immigration and the bigger picture of shifting labor supply and demand ultimately will fail to improve our system.Amid the impassioned policy debates, almost no attention is paid to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, or USCIS. Yet as the entity responsible for processing all applications, it underpins the entire legal immigration system. The inefficiency of this system is well-known....
Another vital but disregarded issue is demographic change. The vast increase in illegal workers in the United States reflects not just the "push" of developing country poverty, but as importantly the "pull" of high labor demand by the U.S. economy...
This labor demand will only increase in the coming decades. he baby boomers, whose 80 million members represent the largest generation in America's history, are nearing retirement. Over the next few decades they will leave the workforce, opening up current positions while also creating new jobs, particularly in the health care and related service industries. The next generation, Generation X, has 15 million fewer members....As a result, the United States will need more migrants in order to sustain our economic growth. Yet the current immigration bill will not provide a legal path to fill this certain future demand.
[quote ends]
I remain agog at Americans who don't understand this, or see the connection between the presence of undocumented workers and the fact that people keep hiring them to work. I mean, I agree there's a problem; or rather, I agree that a lot of people think there's a problem which means there is. But if the work is there and it needs doing, why aren't those people hiring Americans to do it? That's really the question. And if there aren't Americans to do it, then what? What? What price your "caps" and limits in that case?
But of course, I am but a simple Democrat and these types of issues are over my head. So I suggest you go to The Washington Post article above, read it carefully, and consider whether it's possible that the author is right. And if so, what are our options? .
I laughed my facking uss off. Are you up late or up early?
Posted by: Cupples | June 02, 2007 at 06:21 AM