Third World Amerika
"As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs." -- Henry David Thoreau
From sierra:
"An immoral law makes it a man's duty to break it, at every hazard. For Virtue, according to the old lawgivers, is the very self of every man. It is, therefore, a principle of law, that an immoral contract is void, and that an immoral statute is void. For, as laws do not make right, but are simply declaratory of a right which already existed, it is not to be presumed that they can so stultify themselves, as to command injustice." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
# Mike Luckovich at The Militant Libertarian - Bad Apple - cartoon commentary on the Lynndie England affair. Mr. Pot? Meet Ms. Kettle. [militant]
# Marian Blasberg and Anita Blasberg at Der Spiegel - A Tale of Two Lives Destroyed by Abu Ghraib - an American soldier and a respected Iraqi, joined by the horror of Abu Ghraib. [claire]
# Fred Reed - Diving Into The Third World - on the irresistable current tranforming Amerika into a third-world country. [jomama]
America is hollowing out, I tell you. Fast. It's societal apoptosis, cultural gangrene by national choice. It hasn't quite gotten bad enough for people in Texas to notice it, as they drive their Subarus to Wal-Mart to buy Chinese merchandise, but give it five years. Maybe ten. The Soviet Union collapsed from sheer bumbling foolishness. We're working on it.
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Then there's the War on Drugs. Uncle Sugar spends billions for decades on eliminating drugs, and what do we have? Every rec drug you've ever heard of is available at prices you can't afford to turn down, delivered by an efficient system of distribution that reaches conveniently into every town in the country. Want half a key of grass? Your friendly local connection will bring it to your door. Suppose Washington tried to distribute drugs that well. Prices would soar. Everyone would go into withdrawal.
How about illegal immigration? The feds really did well on that one, no te parece? Washington tells poor Mexicans, "Look, it's illegal to cross this border, see? But if you make it we'll give you welfare, medical care, jobs, driver's licenses, and schools of a sort for your kids. If you don't make it, we'll send you back and you can try again. Now, don't cross it, you hear?"
The best way to get rid of immigration would be to have Washington encourage it. No Mexican would live long enough to finish the paperwork.
# Joe Sobran - "National Service" And Involuntary Servitude - the draft, any kind of mandatory "National Service" program, and taxation of any kind blatantly violate the thirteenth amendment prohibition of slavery. But the courts will never rule that way. They rewrite the Constitution daily to mean whatever they want it to mean. [alisvoice]
American courts have always exempted the draft from the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition against slavery. The courts do the same for taxes. If the government owns you and your labor, including your property, the thinking seems to run, it isn't really slavery.
But the essence of slavery doesn't lie in who owns you; it lies in the mere fact of your being owned at all. The key term is involuntary. Private chattel slavery has been replaced by state slavery, disguised by the genial rhetoric of democracy. Slavery becomes giving something back, everyone doing his part, and so on. One writer speaks loftily of "an ethic of common provision."
All such talk obscures the essential element of force -- organized state coercion under the forms of law.
One caller to the talk show got it right: "national service," he pointed out, is unconstitutional; and so are welfare programs, which the government has no authority to create.
# David Bailey at Reuters - Delphi files for bankruptcy, job cuts to follow - the largest U.S. auto parts supplier has been drive to its knees by the United Auto Workers Union. Could be near the end for the U.S. auto industry. [root]
Delphi's filing listed assets of $17.1 billion as of Aug. 31 and debts totaling $22.17 billion. It had revenue of $28.6 billion in 2004, including $12.7 billion from GM in North America.
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Delphi's bankruptcy is among the 15 largest since 1980, based on rankings on the BankruptcyData.com Web site.
Delphi said it plans to emerge from bankruptcy in early to mid-2007, after substantially cutting U.S. manufacturing operations and modifying labor agreements to reduce wages and benefits.
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Delphi is the third large U.S. parts supplier to file for bankruptcy protection in 2005. Auto interiors producer Collins & Aikman Corp. (...) filed in May and auto-body frames producer Tower Automotive Inc. (...) filed in February. (Additional reporting by Ilaina Jonas in New York and Poornima Gupta in Detroit)
