Amazing blog by Driftglass [View All]

[Cassandra]

http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2006/03/live-free-or-buy.html

"In 1861 the South was prosperous specifically because of the forced labor of four million brown people who were reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.

In 2006, America is prosperous specifically because of the peonage-cheap, illegal labor of twelve million brown people who are reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.

We tolerate with a wink-and-a-nudge a system that simultataneously criminalizes a labor force of twelve million to keep them underground and terrified, and then carefully extracts their labor for pennies.

Any social policy which doesn’t confront immigration on those terms will fail and fail badly because, in the end, we really only have two choices: Either a renegotiation of the social contract to pay working people a living wage, or an open recognition that we will forever rely more and more on cheaper and cheaper labor to remain spoiled and Holy.

So far we have chosen neither. We have chosen to burn through our collective inheritance of wealth and prestige to make foolish choices, set foolish policies, wage foolish wars, without having to feel any pain. Like crack-heads, we have stolen from our parents and mooched from our children enough fast, high-interest cash to allow us to trundle along in a state of oblivious Eloi-ness where we don’t have to make any hard decisions and our God-Given Right to Comfort and Ease keeps us from asking too many tough questions about where all this Free Lunch is actually coming from."

Read the whole thing. It's really good.