This is a conservative?!

Quote from CNN, 'Let the prisoners pick the fruits':

King analyzed the issue in class terms.

"The elite class in America is becoming a ruling class and they've made enough money by hiring cheap illegal labor that they think they also have some kind of a right to cheap servants to manicure their nails and their lawn, for example.

"So this ruling class, this new ruling class of America, is expanding a servant class in America at the expense of the middle class of America, the blue collar of America that used to be able to punch a time clock, buy a modest house and raise their families.... Those young people are cut out of this process."

Had not really thought of this particular issue in those particular terms. This is a conservative?!

So the question is, when we say "these are jobs native-born Americans won't do", do we mean at all or just for pissant wages?

If the latter, then is the problem who's willing to do the work for peanuts or is the problem that we refuse to pay more than peanuts? Like, why shouldn't a manicure or a housecleaning or restaurant service be worth 4-5 times the wage they are now, and why shouldn't we wealthiest people on earth pay luxury prices for luxury services?

I've previously criticized Americans' fanatical desire for Wal-Mart prices on everything and how that strengthens the whole downward spiral: wage depression, outsourcing and offshoring, etc. Bottom line, we can either demand the lower prices or we can demonize the illegals (and offshorers) who make those prices possible but not both?

I've heard it said that any job is intrinsically "worth" whatever people are willing to accept for doing it. But that only works if the entire globe is a level playing field and wage workers have real choices. It isn't, and they don't. So wages are already unnatural, and the richest corporate executives stockpile the benefits of that. I wonder why we wouldn't want a democratic government to set unnatural wages to benefit the rest of us, instead. Seems to me that's the only way it'd make any sense to crack down on illegal immigration.

Once upon a benefit concert

Just last week I read, and was intrigued by, The Rock Star's Burden, an NYT op-ed. (Subject to login and possible future archiving, sorry.)

The gist of it is that the West in general, and rock stars in particular, have got it all wrong where aid to developing nations is concerned. A specific way in which this is proposed to be so is the bottomless pit of corruption in so many of the world's poorest countries. The article raises an excellent question: when we send monetary aid, or promote debt relief, how carefully are we examining where that money will go and how it will be used?

I was a pre-teen Band-Aid/Live Aid junkie. Only after college did I start to learn things: that the Ethiopian famine (like many) was not a natural disaster, as it was presented to us, but largely was inflicted intentionally in the course of a civil war. That donations often don't reach their destinations due to theft, lack of transport vehicles, insecurity of roads, lack of roads. That aid can be seized and used as a tool to manipulate and repress people. That local farms fail when they can't compete with free food aid; that agriculture is abandoned when people have to move to centralized aid distribution camps. The list goes on.

It had not previously occurred to me that foreign aid, administered naïvely, could potentially cause harm.

Are these high-profile projects really about helping the needy, or are they about convincing ourselves that we've Done Something? That we've Done Enough?

Earlier this fall, there were articles reporting that for all the buzz generated by Live 8, not many actual accomplishments have materialized. I don't know for sure whether that's true, or fair.

Live Aid in 1985 asked for donations, which people sent in. I wonder what it means that Live 8 in 2005 focused so much attention on debt forgiveness. We're not even pretending to give of ourselves any more... we exhort somebody else to give and that feels like we've Done Enough?

But the op-ed writer's solutions didn't seem like a big improvement. He criticized Bill and Melinda Gates for proposing to send computers to schools in the developing world that currently don't have paper and pencils, which admittedly does seem at best premature, but he didn't give them any credit for their work on AIDS, malaria, and global health research in general. He talked about the brain-drain of doctors and professionals from their own countries and proposed "Northern Exposure" style educational contracts to keep them working locally for a few years. Do those work? It's easy to poke holes in someone else's work; much harder to come up with poke-resistant alternatives.

With all that fresh on my mind, Bono and the Gateses are Time magazine's Persons of the Year. I'm not sure what to make of that now.