It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
America has capital, Mexico has labour. They go together like a horse and carriage. Mexican President Calderon sounds just like Herr Doctor Professor Marx.
“It’s impossible to stop that by decree. It’s impossible to try to stop that with a fence. Why? Because the capital in America needs Mexican workers. And Mexican workers need opportunities of jobs. Capital and labor are like right shoe and left shoe, and one needs the other,” he said, in an interview with Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America.”
Calderon told Sawyer that some of his own relatives live and work in the United States— "some of them in the vegetable fields, others in restaurants and others in construction," he said.
Immigration to America is a "natural phenomenon," Calderon said, because Mexico has a large, young labor force that is needed by U.S. businesses, a sentiment that some politicians and business leaders across the country agree with.
The racism and oppression Latino Americans faced gave Leonard Bernstein his idea for a rewrite of Romeo and Juliet, and it was a young Stephen Sondheim who penned these caustic lyrics. As America tries to close its borders the song America and West Side Story itself are still relevant after fifty years.
West Side Story Turns 50 The Show Took Broadway By Storm And Changed The Broadway Musical Forever
American musical theater celebrates a major anniversary in 2007. Fifty years ago this month - on September 26, 1957 - "West Side Story" opened on Broadway. Based on William Shakespeare's famous tragedy "Romeo and Juliet," "West Side Story" introduced a dramatically new approach to the music, dance motifs, and storytelling of a stage musical.
The idea of West Side Story began with the man who was to become its director/choreographer, Jerome Robbins. He imagined a contemporary retelling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on the back streets of New York City. It was originally the East Side, surprisingly enough, the conflict being Catholic/Jewish. Robbins's collaborator on several previous projects, composer Leonard Bernstein, persuaded him that it would work better if depicted on the West Side, with white New Yorkers vs. immigrant Puerto Ricans. The musicals staged in New York could be politically liberal before movies generally tried to be. Hence the satiric power of a song like “America,” which counterpointed immigrant pride and immigrant disenchantment. Audiences in September 1957 heard “America” sung as inadvertent backbeat to Little Rock’s white mobs, who were attacking black children daring to desegregate Central High School. Such was the momentum of the civil rights revolution that, by 1961, the Oscar-winning film version had enough moral freedom to add that “life is all right in America” — but only “if you’re all white in America.” It was also easier to find “a terrace apartment” if you could “get rid of your accent.” In 1957, in an atmosphere of complacency in national politics, the “America” depicted in “West Side Story” was scarred by prejudice and violence, which this musical condemned with a raw energy that was irrepressible. Fifty years ago this month, a genre that was so often dismissed as escapist entertainment finally grew up.
And lets not forget the classic progressive rock version of America which launched Keith Emerson's career.
"America,"by the Nice. Keith Emerson's '60s organ-playing sounds like an acid flashback. Is that a good thing? The Nice make you think so. It's listed on iTunes as "America (2nd Amendment)."
West Side Story - America
ROSALIA Puerto Rico, You lovely island . . . Island of tropical breezes. Always the pineapples growing, Always the coffee blossoms blowing . . .
ANITA Puerto Rico . . . You ugly island . . . Island of tropic diseases. Always the hurricanes blowing, Always the population growing . . . And the money owing, And the babies crying, And the bullets flying. I like the island Manhattan. Smoke on your pipe and put that in!
OTHERS I like to be in America! O.K. by me in America! Ev'rything free in America For a small fee in America!
ROSALIA I like the city of San Juan.
ANITA I know a boat you can get on.
ROSALIA Hundreds of flowers in full bloom.
ANITA Hundreds of people in each room!
ALL Automobile in America, Chromium steel in America, Wire-spoke wheel in America, Very big deal in America!
ROSALIA I'll drive a Buick through San Juan.
ANITA If there's a road you can drive on.
ROSALIA I'll give my cousins a free ride.
ANITA How you get all of them inside?
ALL Immigrant goes to America, Many hellos in America; Nobody knows in America Puerto Rico's in America!
ROSALIA I'll bring a T.V. to San Juan.
ANITA If there a current to turn on!
ROSALIA I'll give them new washing machine.
ANITA What have they got there to keep clean?
ALL I like the shores of America! Comfort is yours in America! Knobs on the doors in America, Wall-to-wall floors in America!
Tancredo has Bay Buchanan, working for him. Bay is known for claiming Congress is full of pagans, and is sister of arch nativist anti-immigrant politician and media pundit; Pat Buchanan.
"We're looking to finish in the top half. But we're staying in right through the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire (primary)," said Tancredo senior adviser Bay Buchanan. "We have a lot of momentum and energy building."
The Colorado congressman, whose presidential platform has focused almost entirely on stopping illegal immigration, has centered his campaign in Iowa.
The irony is that Tancredo is the Republican Congressman from Colorado. And his single issue is immigration, or more correctly attacking migrant workers.
“When I first came to Congress, the issue of immigration reform was what really motivated me,” he said. “... I still believe it’s the most serious domestic policy issue we face as a nation.”
Tancredo said illegal immigration is causing lost jobs for Americans, wage depression, stress on school systems, higher medical costs, higher expenses for the nation’s prison systems, increased gang activity and increased drug use, specifically methamphetamine.
Perhaps he should be chatting with the farmers in his state who rely on migrant labour and are unable to find workers for their farms. Even under the current American Temporary Worker Visa program. After all Iowa is farm country too. And farmers rely on migrant workers to get their products to market. Even in Alberta.
The NewsHour reports on how the problem is affecting individual farmers and the American economy.
TOM BEARDEN: Pisciotta and others farmers say increased raids by immigration enforcement officials on farms and businesses, coupled with new anti-illegal immigration laws passed in Colorado last year, have depleted the migrant-immigrant workforce on which they depended for decades. Some of those workers were undocumented.
Bruce Talbott says, as rumors of raids spread through the migrant community, fewer people showed up to work. He worried that immigration officials might show up and disrupt his harvest.
BRUCE TALBOTT, Talbott Farms: My worst fear is to lose a percent, significant percent of my people in the middle of harvest. And because our income -- 70 percent of my income is generated in six weeks. And if that falls apart, there's no way to recoup that.
TOM BEARDEN: Talbott had no choice but to turn to a federal guest-worker program called H2A. It was first established in 1943 and reformed in 1986 during the last round of immigration reform. Last year, farmers throughout the country used H2A to legally bring in more than 59,000 agricultural workers from outside the United States.
BRUCE TALBOTT: The H2A program is the government visa program to bring in farm workers. And it's a very expensive, bureaucratic and cumbersome process, so we've tried to avoid it as long as we could. We always saw H2A as an act of desperation and something you would only do as a last-ditch effort to stay in business. We didn't expect to end up there.
TOM BEARDEN: Talbott says he pays $2,400 each year just to apply to the Department of Labor and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for a specific number of foreign workers. He had to demonstrate that there was no local labor available by placing month-long advertisements in the local papers. Talbot also paid $300 per worker for visas and security certification.
And for each of his 35 H2A workers, he paid $160 for round-trip transportation to and from their home countries. Farmers must also provide free, federally approved housing, and pay a higher hourly wage than has been traditional, a rate set by each state. This year, it is $8.64 an hour in Colorado; he used to pay just over $7 an hour.
Lou Dobbs has discovered political secularism. In his continuing nativist war on 'illegal aliens' and illegal immigrants, Lou has recently discovered that Christians in America are a political lobby.
During a gushing interview with Chris Hitchens over his new book on Atheism, God Is Not Great, Hitchens sucked up to nativist Dobbs and asked him to pin the American flag pin to his sport coat collar, since he had just become an official American, the love affair between these two nationalist populist pedagogues was thus sealed.
Hitchens does come over as a bit toad-like, possibly smelling of martinis and cigarettes, but he will move some books with this lengthy and sympathetic interview.
Hitchens is likewise a sort of conservative, supporting the Iraq War, for example. He mentioned that he had just become an American citizen, which will have a nice appeal for the flag-waving old school conservatives that watch Lou Dobbs on CNN. (A bit of a joke I suppose for Dobbs' usual anti-illegal immigrant audience that instead of illegal immigration of hispanics they get a legally immigrated atheist).
And following his 'conversion' to radical secularism, not quite atheism just good old American deism, Lou has expanded his populist nativist war on 'aliens' to include institutional Christianity, the very base of the Republican right. But of course for Lou the bad Churches are the liberal ones that support amnesty.
And outrage after a pro-amnesty group gives illegal aliens instructions on how to circumvent our immigration laws.
DOBBS: The nation's religious leaders tonight bypassing the notion of separation of church and state. In fact they're lobbying Washington and lobbying hard for amnesty for illegal aliens, both on the pulpit and by direct mail.
Lisa Sylvester reports now on the campaign by the Catholic Church and other Christian churches to influence if not direct the Senate debate on amnesty legislation. Casey Wian reports on a renewed call for amnesty from Cardinal Roger Mahony and the mayor of Los Angeles. SYLVESTER (on camera): Church leaders may be pushing for amnesty but a Zogby poll from last year asks the members of the Christian faith if they supported a get tough approach to illegal immigration. That is, securing the border and doing employment checks. Seventy- five percent of Protestants responded that was a good or very good idea. Seventy-seven percent of born-again Christians also agreed and 66 percent of Catholics also backed tougher enforcement measures.
So Lou, it appears that there's a bit of a disconnect between church leaders and church goers on this issue. Lou?
DOBBS: And there's just as large, if not a larger disconnect between our political elites and American citizens on the same issue. Did you, by any chance ask why in the world this reverend would suggest that this is a choice between Jesus Christ and Lou Dobbs?
SYLVESTER: I think he was trying make the point that it's one or the other. But clearly he was being a little facetious.
DOBBS: I hope so. Because -- When these folks start talking -- suggesting that God tells them not to worry about border security and not to worry about illegal immigration, and -- you know, I start worrying a little bit about the secular interests of this country. Any discussion about separation of church and state for crying out loud?
SYLVESTER: That line does seem to be very blurred on this issue. Now the church feels like it's essentially their mandate to protect the poor but it is clearly written in scripture that it is also the mandate of Christians to respect the rule of law. Romans 13.
DOBBS: Well, I am impressed with the citation, I couldn't have done as well but I appreciate you doing so.
Lisa Sylvester, thank you very much.
In Los Angeles, renewed calls tonight for amnesty for illegal aliens. Cardinal Roger Mahony and the mayor of Los Angeles making the push at a special mass held yesterday.
DOBBS: Well, I think that the good cardinal should check out Lisa Sylvester's citation of Romans. There's something to me -- I'll put it this way -- inappropriate about con founding, confusing and conflating religion and secular issues such as politics and the law of the land.
This is, to me, inexplicable and very troubling. I suspect a lot of other folks, as matter of fact, given those surveys about the disconnect between the membership of the Protestant churches and the membership of the Catholic churches both, I think a lot of people have to be deeply troubled.
So if Lou is upset as he was yesterday about Christians pushing their agenda for amnesty for migrant workers in the U.S. what does he have to say about Roe Vs. Wade?
Giuliani had difficulty answering questions about abortion, especially when moderator Chris Matthews asked the candidates whether Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, should be repealed. Though everyone before him answered yes unequivocally, Giuliani said tepidly: "It would be OK."
"OK to repeal?" Matthews asked.
"It would be OK to repeal," Giuliani said. "It would be OK also if a strict constructionist judge viewed it as precedent, and I think a judge has to make that decision."
Actually, Giuliani did give a real answer later, when he said he does not like abortion, but "since it is an issue of conscience, I would respect a woman's right to make a different choice." Too bad it took so long.
Or the fact that three Republican Candidates for President said they did not believe in Science!
It ought to count as a national embarrassment not just that the 10 Republican presidential aspirants were asked in their first debate whether they believe in evolution but, worse, that the question was called for. And worst of all, that three testified to their disbelief. Upon being asked if anyone on the stage “does not believe in evolution,” Senator Sam Brownback, Former Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo raised their hands. That alone should spell an immediate end to their respective candidacies. It indicates that their minds have been so thoroughly poisoned by religious literalism - truly fundamentalism of the most dangerous kind - that they have lost touch with reality.
Inquiring minds want to know.
Lou has made the step towards democratic secularism, now he has to understand that it is not just a matter of separating Church and State, but of recognizing the American libertarian ideal; No God, No Master, and now add to that; No One Is Illegal. Dobbs needs to abandon his nativism since America was founded on the migrant labour of indentured servitude and slavery.
The words, "No Gods, No Masters," originates from Margaret Sanger from the title of an article about birth control. It fits because nowhere in the Constitution does it mention deities, or masters. Our government derives from We the People not by gods, kings, or masters but by the very mortal citizens of the United States.
