MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘civil right’

Eric Weinstein: Immigration Is Cannibalization by the Elite

Posted by M. C. on July 27, 2020

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/07/25/eric-weinstein-immigration-is-cannibalization-by-the-elite/

by Neil Munro

U.S. immigration policy is a form of cannibalism in which hungry elites devour Americans’ wealth and civil rights, Eric Weinstein told Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

“Instead of seeing each other as a source of camaraderie, or military support, or innovation, we started using each other as a source of protein, and then we started out the process of American self-cannibalization,” said Weinstein, who is the managing director of Peter Thiel’s venture capital fund, Thiel Capital.

The cannibalism was prompted by the elite’s failure in the 1970s to keep growing the nation’s economy, said Weinstein, who earned a PhD. in mathematical physics from Harvard.

The cannibalization is allowing Antifa and other extremists to emerge into the nation’s streets, just as AIDS first weakens the immune system and then allows underlying diseases to emerge and kill people, said Weinstein, who was invited by Cruz to talk on his July 23 discussion show, “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”

The crazies and creepies that are roaming the American stage were present in every era. The Ku Klux Klan was present, the anarchists were present … When we lost [economic] growth, we became immunocompromised and all the creepy crawlies are coming out from every particular place. They’re coming up to the right, they’re coming from the left.

In the United States, the civil right that is being eaten by the elite cannibals is each Americans’ right to make a living in their shared, American-only, national labor market, said Weinstein.

You have the right to your own [national] labor market. Given that your country maintains a right to conscript you [for war, and] to tax you, [then one] part of the social contract is that [Americans] get a share in your country’s wealth through having a right [to work in the United States, without competition from foreign nationals]. Now the interesting part about it is, if we [elites] can just get your right declared [to be] an impediment to the free market, we can take your right [by forcing you to compete against foreign workers in the United States] without having to pay you anything for it.

Cruz listened carefully but made no comments.

The political disease began in the 1980s in the nation’s elite universities, where science employers tried to boost their slowing innovation by importing cheap labor to force down the wages of American scientists, he said.

The National Science Foundation [and] the National Academy of Sciences had to team up in order to effectively rescue the universities if [legislators] weren’t going to put in more money. And so what we [elites] came up with was a brilliant idea; We would lie about American scientists and engineers, we would say that they were lousy, and that they weren’t interested in contributing to this very demanding profession. And by the way, we have a universe filled with the best and the brightest in poor countries in Asia, and we should just bring them over in large numbers. Because what we’d always done is we had a labor force that was based on apprentice labor. So the [science] students are actually the workers but by calling them students, you don’t have to pay them. You don’t allow them to unionize … But you don’t actually admit that what’s going on is that you’re coming up with people who are willing to accept visas as payment.

…

[We] got the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences to stab American scientists in the back, on behalf of scientific employers [amid] all of the sloppy talk about best and brightest.

“There is essentially no one at my level that I know of, who is openly against high-skilled immigration as the worst part of our immigration [policy],” he added. 

Weinstein is a long-standing critic of the H-1B and the J-1 visa worker pipelines that pressure science employers to hire cheap foreign graduates instead of Americans.

The universities’ disease spread throughout the economy, he said:

All of these [1980s] supply-side gimmicks and the offshoring, and the downsizing and the financialization and all of these things, were not good enough to actually deal with the underlying problem [reduced economic growth] because it didn’t have a diagnosis as to what actually happened [to slow growth]. What it was good enough to do was to keep some slices of the pie growing at the expense of others.

“That’s the whole globalization stuff … the idea is that right now, what you have is you have certain sectors [which] grow by cannibalizing other sectors, and if we call that ‘growth,’ we can fudge our national [economic growth] statistics,” he said.

Fortune 500 companies and universities are sidelining more than one million American graduates by employing a population of at least 1.3 million foreign graduates, plus a growing population of white-collar illegals. These legal and illegal foreign workers rationally prefer their subordination and their lower wages — plus the dangled hope of citizenship — to the alternative choice of returning home to India, China, or elsewhere.

Many of those foreign workers arrive via the universities’ “Practical Training” pipelines. The pipelines provide the universities with $4o billion in revenue and also push many jobs and much wealth from the heartland states out to the wealthy coasts.

The economic cannabilism by the elite has gradually destroyed the public’s trust in merit and the free market as a route to success, he said: “We have so much cannibalization that we’ve given up on merit because we now see merit as an excuse [political cover]. And this is actually a fair point of the Maoists [protesters] who don’t see a fair world.”

Weinstein’s description of the protesters as “Maoists” is a reference to China’s Red Guard protestors, who was used by party chief Mao Zedong to attack political rivals, as well as China’s culture and history in 1966 and 1967.

The elite cannibalism damaged the market’s ability to fairly distribute wealth, he said. “There was an implicit sort of morality in [free] market mechanisms. Now, as a person on the left, I’m a huge fan of markets. Why? Because there’s nothing more progressive … Markets are what lift people up.”

Americans cannot stop the cannibalization by the elite — or Weinstein describes it, “the core”– until the elite admits the central economic problem:

There’s a huge problem that we need to get to, which is that the reason that we can’t get out of our national nightmare at the moment, is that the center has to make a move that it refuses to do. And the center — or “the core” would be a better way of saying it — has to admit that it became kleptocratic. And so the corruption of the core left and the core right means that there’s nowhere [for Americans] to turn.

 

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com.

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Why Are Blacks Democrats? | Intellectual Takeout

Posted by M. C. on May 5, 2020

Despite their almost unanimous endorsement of civil rights legislation and dutiful support for every extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Republicans, particularly black Republicans, turn off black voters.

This dislike of Republicans may now be part of American black ethnic identity.

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/why-are-blacks-democrats/

By Paul Gottfried

The fate of Karen Whitsett, a black Democratic representative to the Michigan House of Representatives, who was censured by her fellow black Democrats from Detroit, for developing good relations with President Trump, speaks volumes. It tells us, if any further proof were required, how deeply American blacks hate the Republican Party and any black person who does not share this loathing completely.

Although Ben Carson may be the famous success story produced by a poor black family in Detroit, this distinguished surgeon and cabinet official was denied the privilege of having a school in his old neighborhood named after him. Carson’s sin is having served in a Republican administration.

In 2014, Tim Scott became the first black Senator from South Carolina since Reconstruction. But since Scott was a Republican, he won only 10 percent of the black vote in his state, while carrying 88 percent of the white vote. After Scott’s victory, South Carolina black Democratic Congressmen James Clyburn immediately denounced him as a race traitor who was against “the interests and aspirations of 95 percent of blacks.” In an optimistic moment, Scott predicted that Trump would increase his share of the black vote in this year’s election by 50 percent.

That share, according to Scott, would rise from 9 percent to 14 percent; and this was to be considered a vindication for a Republican president who (before COVID-19 hit) had improved the job prospects of blacks more than any other president, including his black Democratic predecessor Barack Obama. The Hill reports that an “overwhelming majority of blacks will vote for any Democrat against Trump” and put black hostility against Trump at 85 percent, which is actually saying the same thing as Scott, albeit in a less positive way.

The black vote normally goes at a rate of 90 percent or more to Democratic candidates for any office. Not even Obama won a significantly higher percentage of the black vote than other Democratic presidential candidates. Although Obama turned out black voters in higher numbers in his presidential bid than John Kerry or Al Gore, he won the black vote against his Republican opponent by only a few points more than other recent Democratic presidential candidates.

In 2008, three black Republican candidates, including the Pittsburgh Steelers legend Lynn Swann, lost their races for the governorship, with the black vote going heavily against them. If Swann had won, he would have been the first black governor of Pennsylvania. But black voters turned against their onetime sports hero because of his Republican affiliation. Apparently voting for Swann or another highly qualified black Republican gubernatorial candidate running that year, Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio, was not deemed a racial breakthrough. The problem in both cases was the black politician belonged to a national party that blacks abhor.

The intensity of this hatred has remained for me a mystery. I still recall a black girlfriend of my daughter at the University of Michigan who went into a rage because the school had dared to invite as a speaker President George H.W. Bush. This friend considered this unsettling invitation to be an act of disrespect against her race. Curiously, the same black student was a fundamentalist Christian and fierce opponent of abortion, yet she ritualistically voted for the Democrats because she considered the Republicans a living reproach against blacks.

I won’t go into the usual GOP song and dance about all the civil rights legislation that the Republicans supported at a higher percentage than Democrats or that Republicans had once freed black slaves. What is hard for me to figure out is why this hatred has developed and grown more intense over time.

The idea that I used to hear from academic colleagues, that blacks became Democrats because the Republican Party allied itself with segregationists in the 1960s, is totally false. Blacks switched parties in 1936, when they voted 76 percent for FDR. In 1932, blacks still voted in even larger numbers for Hoover.

Well into the 1960s, both Southern blacks and white segregationists were Democrats, but when Southern whites began moving into the GOP, blacks stayed with the Democratic Party. Blacks stayed there even after Republicans sponsored and supported civil rights laws. The only Republican presidential candidate whom blacks voted for in respectable numbers since 1936 was Eisenhower in 1952, when the Democratic ticket featured a strong segregationist, John Sparkman of Alabama, as vice-presidential candidate. That year a Republican candidate, who was the Allied war commander in World War II, won 37 percent of the black vote nationwide.

I believe it is less the case that blacks hate Republicans because they are loyal Democrats than that they are Democrats because they loathe Republicans. Black leaders who are allied with the Democrats will accuse Republicans of nasty racist intentions and find willing black listeners, whom they can drive to the polls by attacking Republicans as anti-black. Strangely enough, most black voters, as Red State correctly points out, identify themselves as conservative or moderate. Black voters almost always support in primaries the presidential candidates of the Democratic National Committee leadership and their own Democratic leaders. Their choice of Biden this year was no exception; their preference for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008 was.

In recent years, black Democrats James Clyburn, John Lewis, Elijah Cummings, and Maxine Waters have complained that the Republicans insist on voter identification in order to keep blacks from the polls. Whether this charge is correct (and it may be), it is hard to blame Republicans for wanting to limit black turnout on election day. Despite their almost unanimous endorsement of civil rights legislation and dutiful support for every extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Republicans, particularly black Republicans, turn off black voters.

This dislike of Republicans may now be part of American black ethnic identity. The GOP may have to deal with this likely possibility and give up shedding crocodile tears over “black victims” of Democratic politicians in inner cities. That message seems incapable of convincing its intended audience.

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