Immigration Uproar

An editorial on CNN Opinion purports to explain why the uproar over immigration has gone nationwide, but the authors, Audrey Singer and Jill H. Wilson, both at the Brookings Institution, left out some key factors. The factors they cite are the economic downturn and the increase of immigrant populations in urban and suburban areas from 2000 to 2010. "The friction in places unaccustomed to or unprepared for new inflows of foreigners, particularly those who are assumed to be present illegally, manifests itself in different ways."

Scapegoating is common when there's an economic downturn, because those who are actually to blame for the country's economic woes want to divert attention away from themselves. Fanning the flames of racism and xenophobia is a time-honored method of deflecting blame toward those who have the least power:

History is full of irrefutable evidence that when the economy gets bad, scapegoats are targeted, and the worst instincts of humanity reveal themselves. Alabama has asked its citizens to cross invisible boundaries of humanity—waging political battles on the backs of school children, cutting access to the most basic human needs, like water. —Ilyse Hogue.

Although most Americans favor reasonable, comprehensive immigration reform, the small percentage of those who don't are the ones who are the most vocal. They believe they have a personal, vested interest in driving people of color out of their communities. Their fear and hatred compels them. That hatred is validated and reinforced by the terrorizing raids of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

On the other hand, few of those who favor reasonable reform are as compelled or as vocal. Because they may not feel that they personally have a vested interest in the outcome, they keep silent while the xenophobes freely and prolifically spew their hatred.

Another reason anti-immigrant uproar has gone nationwide is that there's a lot of money being funneled into it. And capitalism, whose great golden calf is the bottom line unhindered by any moral compunctions, is always in favor of cheap, exploitable labor with no legal protections. Just ask the booming prisons-for-profit industry.

The Immigration Policy Center dispels the notion that immigrants are the cause of unemployment:

Immigrants are not the cause of unemployment in the United States. Empirical research has demonstrated repeatedly that there is no correlation between immigration and unemployment. In fact, immigrants—including the unauthorized—create jobs through their purchasing power and their entrepreneurship, buying goods and services from U.S. businesses and creating their own businesses, both of which sustain U.S. jobs. The presence of new immigrant workers and consumers in an area also spurs the expansion of businesses, which creates new jobs.

We have to realize that we do indeed, all of us, have a stake in what happens to the immigrants in our midst. We must raise our voices above the uproar and advocate for common sense and compassion. The immigrants among us are our brothers and sisters, and in answer to a very old question, we are indeed their keepers.

Don't It Always Seem to Go...

My husband works for the US Postal Service, so the assault on the USPS certainly affects us directly. Nothing short of our livelihood is at stake. But that's only part of why I am determined to do all I can to help save the post office. The loss of the US Postal Service would have widespread and devastating effects on all of us. It would have an adverse effect on our unemployment levels, our economy, our commerce and community life. It is not an exaggeration to say that the loss of the US Postal Service would affect every single person in the country.

The USPS is under assault from many different angles: massive closings of post offices across the country, massive closings of processing plants, breaking union contracts to make massive layoffs, going to five-day delivery, reduction of service standards for first-class mail. This is a long-planned and well-coordinated attack, a nightmarish game of Whac-A-Mole with threats on all sides. And not even one mole has yet been whacked.

Any one of those threats could lead either to the complete demise of the US Postal Service or to such a serious downgrade that the USPS would essentially become an arm of the direct marketing association.

The US Postal Service is the second-largest nonmilitary employer in the United States, second only to Walmart. In the last four years, the number of USPS employees has been reduced by 110,000, plus another 20,500 so far in 2011. This doesn’t include the 120,000 layoffs the postmaster general wants to make or the 100,000 more jobs to be lost to attrition. That’s a loss of 350,500 out of 645,000, well over half. To so rashly jeopardize so many good middle-class jobs when the unemployment level is so high is nothing but gross negligence and reckless folly. And yet, that’s exactly what the postmaster general is intent on doing.

With unemployment rates still perilously high, the number of jobs already lost (130,500) is significant. To lose another 220,000 jobs would have a potentially catastrophic effect on unemployment levels and on the economy. It could be enough to push us into a full-blown economic depression.

The Post Office is such a fixture in American lives that we seldom give it much thought. Nearly every town has a post office. Larger towns have several. Your letter carrier will not only deliver your mail but pick up outgoing mail. Many of us give the USPS so little thought that we think we could manage without it no problem.

But think carefully for a moment about what your community would be like without its post office. Think about how many times in your life you’ve gone to the post office, how many times you’ve put outgoing mail in your mailbox, how many times you’ve ordered products online that have been shipped via USPS, how many times you've received birthday cards, holiday cards, condolences, and thank-you notes that made your day.

Maybe some of us wouldn’t notice much. After all, who writes letters and sends them through the mail anymore? Isn’t it the Internet that connects us all now? But the vast majority of Americans, especially those in rural areas, would feel the loss of the Post Office acutely. Yes, the Internet has bound us together in new and exciting ways, but not in ways that obviate the need for our postal service.

The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people. The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. (39 U.S.C. 101(a))

Those who want to dismantle the postal service are counting on Americans being asleep and complacent. They know we don't want to lose our post office, they know we'll be outraged, but they hope that by the time we wake up it will be too late.

Action Items: Moles to Whack

Sign and share the petition to maintain the current service standards for first-class mail. Deadline is October 21, 2011.

Send a letter objecting to the USPS's proposal to "relax" first-class delivery standards to Manager, Industry Engagement and Outreach, United States Postal Service, 475 L’Enfant Plaza, SW – Room 4617, Washington, DC 20260, or e-mail to industryfeedback@usps.com. Deadline is October 21, 2011.

Sign and share the petition to Congress to keep the USPS from being destroyed. We're planning to close this petition and send it to Congress in the very near future. It'd be great if we could get 3,000 signatures before we send it (we currently have 2,864).

Sign and share the WhiteHouse.gov petition to preserve six-day mail delivery.

Sign and share the WhiteHouse.gov petition to save the postal service.

Stay informed. There are already many posts on the Worley Dervish about the assault on the USPS, and we'll continue to post about unfolding developments. There's always lots of good information at Save the Post Office, a website put together by Steve Hutkins.

Let the Revolution Begin!

I refuse to live in a country like this anymore—and I am not leaving.
—Michael Moore

Haven't seen Capitalism: A Love Story yet? Stop everything and make haste to the nearest movie theater. You really don't want to miss this, and the sooner you see it, the sooner you can get with the program. Moore is audacious. He's gutsy. He's irreverent. He's right.

Our root problem as a nation is that we are being run—and overrun—by corporations whose only value, whose only vision is the bottom line. Do we want to be a country run and bullied by greedy bastards? Or do we want to be a people who does their best to respect each other, to treat each other fairly, to protect the most vulnerable in our midst for no reason other than that they are our most vulnerable. They are our people. Not just strangers down on their luck or unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives. They are our people, and we are a people who do what we can to support and protect each other.

We can do better. Much better. And we must do better. If we disengage, things will get much, much worse in a big ol' hurry. And there will be much more suffering before we get ourselves on a better path.

We've been fed a lot of assumptions and propaganda about capitalism. It's time to reexamine them and to examine the alternatives.

I don't always agree with Noam Chomsky, but he never fails to be thought-provoking. So here's a start on examining the alternatives to capitalism.



We'll look at more alternatives, more ways to get involved, and more ways to move the Revolution (with a capital R) along in the coming weeks.

Economic "Expertise"

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has a great op-ed today about experts being a "stunningly poor source of expertise. ... What matters ... isn’t so much knowledge or experience as good judgment."

I began actually paying attention to things economic, oddly enough, when the economy went south last year. As I started really trying to understand, I became increasingly aware that the economic "experts" essentially just blather. They play with numbers and theories, but they don't really know any more than the next guy.

I know this because I myself have some facility with bullshit, having bullshitted my way through many a paper in college. I learned how to sound like I knew what I was talking about, whether I did or not. What astounded me was that my professors were taken in pretty much every time. Developing this facility turned out to be less of a waste of time than you might think, because now I can smell bullshit a mile off. And so much of the economic stuff the media churns out is clearly made of the same stuff as my college papers.

The "discipline" of economics (if you can call it that) apparently labors under the illusion that people are "rational actors." Holy cow! If you start from that assumption, then everything that follows is going to be a load of blarney. In my experience, people rarely act rationally. There is nothing rational about the greedy lunacy that took the world economy to the edge of a cliff.

So I've begun thinking about economics somewhat the way I think about astrology. It's interesting in that it sometimes drives the way the people who believe in it behave. That presumably sentient beings would make weighty decisions based on a lot of hooey fascinates me. In fact, I find it cheering in one sense. I used to think of economics as a sort of recondite science of which I was woefully ignorant. Now I understand that my occasional flashes of good judgment will serve me better than a Ph.D. in economics.

In his column, Kristof refers to an expert on experts (that should curl your toes), Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. (What? And we're supposed to believe this guy? But Nick, he's an expert!) Kristof scarily notes that the media's insistence on delicious little bite-size nuggets of certainty actually subverts any hope a media consumer might have of finding balanced, nuanced information. The "experts" you are most likely to read or hear in the media are the ones who offer those much lusted-after juicy sound-bites.

Mr. Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,” after a famous distinction by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (my favorite philosopher) between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.

I've known a number of hedgehogs in my day. They are indeed very consistent, insistent, certain in their certainty. It's a very comforting line to take, albeit with essentially no basis in reality. They will wow you with their expertise, reminding you of your own ignorance and need for guidance. Yes, they will cause you to doubt yourself and to doubt what you in your better judgment know to be true. Falling for their hoodoo has gotten us into a world of hurt and has taken us perilously close to a terrifying economic precipice.

So it's time to leave the hedgehogs—many of whom can be found, ironically enough, on Fox News—behind and find us some foxes who will help us think and act clearly, out of good conscience and sound judgment. Trust me on this. I'm an expert.

Hard Times

Hardly a day goes by anymore when I don't ask myself, "Where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?" Just when I think I can wrap my mind around it, or even come close to it, I discover that it is actually much worse than I thought.

There are so many things falling into the "even worse than I thought" category that now I'm just lumping them all together: the economy, muscle spasms, the unfathomable depths of corporate greed and callousness, the state of my 401K. Part of my personal pathology is that I feel overwhelmed very easily. And lately I have been feeling intensely overwhelmed.

Rather than listing all of the contributing factors, though, I want to list all the things I tell my friends when they ask the handbasket question, the things I try to tell myself, although I don't always manage to get through.

Juliana of Norwich, medieval mystic:

All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.

This is the long, long, long view. Ultimately, everything will be fine. All the crises and weights and conundrums will ultimately come to naught. At the very bottom and at the very core of everything, there is goodness, light, truth, beauty, justice, joy, and most of all, love. And because of that, "All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well."

Haldir, elf of Lothlorien (from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings):

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.

True, there is great evil afoot. Evil is rampant in the world and having a heyday. But don't let it steal the show. Evil is always noisier, flashier, and more demanding. Good is quieter, steadier, stronger, content to work for the broader long-term benefit. If you sit quietly in the morning light, you can smell it. It is very powerful and available to all who seek it.

Despair can have its own deadly allure, but it is a great deceiver, because good is always more powerful and more enduring than evil. Always.

Another quotation from the Lord of the Rings, this time from the movie, The Two Towers:

Frodo: I can't do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for.

In the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Ah, Samwise the brave and wise, the most fiercely loyal of friends. You could do worse than use Sam as a role model. There is indeed some good in this world, and it is most definitely worth fighting for.

This morning I was feeling, well, you know, overwhelmed and a bit blue. And a dear friend sent me a link to this video. It totally transformed my perspective. As she told me, "It's long but worth it."



When Tom came home this afternoon, not long after I watched that video, I told him how awesome and wonderful he is. And then I sat him down to watch the video while I got ready to go. I heard him laughing while I was in the shower.

No matter where we're going, no matter how fast, no matter how directly downhill—no matter that we're in an overcrowded handbasket—we can still be kind and encourage each other and love each other and focus on the things that really matter. We can spread more joy, more love, more hilarity. And those are most definitely the things that are worth fighting for.

Jon Stewart: Our Best Financial Analyst

This will cheer you up, regardless of the state of your 401K. It's not enough for Stewart to take on Santelli, he goes after CNBC, and he does it brilliantly, using their own words against them.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

So Much for Post-Partisanship?

I don't understand why the auto bailout is unpopular with the public. It seems evident that the ramifications of allowing the U.S. auto industry to tank will be felt deeply and painfully in every nook and cranny of this nation -- and around the world -- and would be a decision deeply regretted for a long time to come.

Of course, this bailout should be handled better than the Wall Street one. Let's start with a little accountability. Please? But with good oversight, the revitalization of the U.S. auto industry could have all kinds of far-reaching positive effects: greener vehicles, the end of planned obsolescence, better fuel economy.

I'm appalled that the Senate Republicans are so crass as to be willing to let the entire world economy tank for the sake of taking a political shot at organized labor. They are unconscionable bullies. I hope they have miscalculated on a grand scale and that their enormous hubris winds around and bites them in the butt big time.
About Auto Bailout
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost