Socializing Costs, Privatizing Profits—Why America`s Rulers Don`t Want Hearings On The Senate Sellout
Speaker of the House Denny Hastert
announced last Wednesday that, rather than send
House negotiators into the proverbial
smoke-filled room with Senators to come up with a
“compromise” immigration bill, the House would hold
hearings around the country to find out what the public
actually thinks about the legislation that will decide
the
future of America.
Hastert`s declaration is perhaps the closest the
American political system can come to the most stirring
sentence in the lexicon of parliamentary politics:
“We will go to the country”—which is what a party
says when it calls a general election to decide a great
issue of state.
But the immediate howls of pain showed once again
that the last thing America`s
elites want on immigration is
citizen input and reasoned deliberation.
Instead, the national newspapers demanded a rush to
judgment—because haste and heedlessness are the most
likely ways they can get what they want.
A New York Times editorial
scornfully denounced the House because “they want
to take a closer look at the Senate bill”—which is
118,227 words long! The Newspaper of Record raged,
“Like the
baffled hominids of `2001: A Space Odyssey,`
they are poking at the Senate`s big-picture approach
with a leg bone.”
The Los Angeles Times editorial board
sputtered, “These meetings are nonsense.”
The
Wall Street Journal editorialistas
hissed, “This is the equivalent of
snake-handling.” (By the way, the most honest
staffer at the WSJ editorial page is the
anonymous person who selects the online reader responses
to their editorials. All
eleven comments he picked excoriate the WSJ`s
open borders dogma. I hope my mentioning his
fairness doesn`t
cost him his job!)
In the Washington Post,
Ruben Navarrette Jr. was in a snit that we weren`t
going to see business as usual.
“Congress … is more
broken than the
U.S.-Mexican border… It`s unusual, to say the least,
for one chamber to hold public hearings on the work of
another. Besides, if you want to hold town hall-style
meetings, why not hold them before bills are passed in
the first place? Maybe because August is close enough to
November so that hearings could affect the midterm
elections.” [Congressional
Immigration Stunts, June 25, 2006]
Imagine that—Members of the House trying to win
votes by doing what the voters want!
Why has it become so rare for the majority party in
the House to “go to the country” like this?
Over the decades, the
technology behind
partisan gerrymandering has improved so much that
election to the House has become close to a lifetime
sinecure—if the Congressman doesn`t blow it by
taking the wrong stand on one of the rare issues that
voters notice.
For example, that`s why Congress hasn`t carried out
its Constitutional duty to declare war since
1942. It prefers to let the President take
responsibility for deciding war or peace—because,
otherwise, citizens might remember how their
Representatives voted and throw them out.
Thus this year`s unusual show of backbone by House
Republicans demonstrates just how exceptionally strong
is public sentiment against the Senate immigration
bill—despite those
rigged polls constantly cited in the
Establishment media.
The New York Times, in fact, just reported in
Bush`s Immigration Plan Stalled as House G.O.P. Grew
More Anxious that:
“Representative Thomas M.
Reynolds of New York, the head of the Republican
Congressional Campaign Committee, went to Mr. Boehner
and Mr. Hastert and, using polling data and pointing to
what he described as
politically implausible sections of the bill, warned
of the consequences of enactment of the Senate
legislation… Mr. Reynolds had told House leaders that
supporting the [Senate] bill would be
`suicide for some of our members.`” [By Adam
Nagourney, Carl Hulse and Jim Rutenberg, June 25, 2006]
Meanwhile, the Senate will try to strike back against
the House. It plans to hold pro-illegal immigration
hearings in some of the few states left, such as
Pennsylvania, where there aren`t yet enough illegal
immigrants to annoy the citizenry.
The San Francisco Chronicle says:
“Senate Judiciary
Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he came up
with the idea for Senate hearings in the shower Thursday
morning. `They have hearings on border security and
employment verification,` Specter said. `OK, that`s fine
… I`m going to have a hearing in Pennsylvania on July
5 … bring in
farmers and
landscapers and people in the
Northeast region as to the
necessity of a guest worker program.`“[
Dueling
immigration hearings split GOP, Carolyn Lochhead,
June 23, 2006]
(This
may be another misjudgment—the town Hazleton, PA is
one of the national leaders in the use of local
ordinances to repel illegals and Senator Rick Santorum
has begun to campaign on the issue.)
The reality is that, as the distinguished economics
analyst
Robert Samuelson has pointed out, the prestige press
was criminally negligent in failing to report that the
Senate bill would vastly increase legal immigration.
Samuelson wrote in
What You Don`t Know About the Immigration Bill
back on May 31:
“One job of journalism is
to
inform the public about what our political leaders
are doing. In this case, we failed. The Senate bill`s
sponsors didn`t publicize its full impact on legal
immigration, and we didn`t fill the void. It`s safe to
say that few Americans know what the bill would do
because no one has told them. Indeed, I suspect that
many senators who voted for the legislation don`t have a
clue as to the
potential overall increase in immigration.”
As last week`s editorial reactions indicate, that
irresponsibility wasn`t an accident. It was a key
component of the Main Stream Media`s
strategy for covering immigration.
Yet, what you aren`t supposed to know can hurt you …
badly.
Let`s step back to put the immigration controversy in
a new and broader historical perspective.
At the end of the
Cold War, Francis Fukuyama
announced that we had reached “The
End of History.” Obviously, somebody forgot
to send History the memo.
Yet, in the narrow Hegelian/Marxist sense in which
Fukuyama used the term “History,” he was correct.
The big controversy of the 20th Century—socialism vs.
capitalism—was effectively over. Pure socialism was
dead. Capitalism had survived, but not
laissez-faire. From now on there would be
markets, but with
government interference.
Unfortunately, many commentators are still living in
the past. They think basic ideology is still the big
issue—the
free market vs.
socialism. Well, history hasn`t ended, but it has
moved into a new stage. Regulated capitalism has won, so
most of the political struggles in the future are not
going to be about the old boldface big ideas like
nationalizing the means of production, but about the
fine print.
The politics of the present and future will revolve
around various
organized interests trying to put one over on the
disorganized rest of us in the particulars of
legislation.
Contra Fukuyama, there will never be a
ceasefire in this struggle between the clever and the
clueless. The Age of Ideology is over but the Age of the
Fine Print is upon us.
For instance, back in 1996 when the California
legislature unanimously
deregulated the
state`s electricity market, few in public life
bothered to read the fine print because the ideological
principle of deregulation seemed so historically
inevitable at the time. Well, it turned out the devil
was definitely in the details. The only people who
mastered the minutiae were the traders at
Enron and other such firms, who
raped California out of billions.
A basic strategy for the crafty to make money is
privatizing profits and socializing costs. To do this,
they use tame politicians and journalists to help them
hand their costs of doing business off to the public.
(Economists, when they aren`t
blinded by ideology, call these costs “externalities.”)
By importing
“cheap labor,” employers shift major
costs—such as
medical care and
policing—to you and me.
The Senate Sellout would further increase the burdens
imposed on us.
And that`s why its supporters in the press don`t want
us to worry our pretty little heads about what`s in
those 118,227 words.
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]


