helot (n):
| 1: | capitalized: a member of a class of serfs in ancient Sparta | |
| 2: | serf, slave |
In the comments to the video of LTC Allen West’s speech, Ex-Dissident said:
There are some very disturbing elements in this speech. When he mentions politicians kowtowing to corporations and businessmen, he sounds an awful lot like our own Marxist in the White House. I would be very skeptical of West’s motives.
And:
I don’t know. He doesn’t sound like a thinking conservative during that speech…
I composed a reply to Ex-Dissident, but it was too long for a Blogger comment, so I’m posting it separately here. I’m assuming that he is not an American, so I will attempt to put Col. West’s words into an American context.
The huge flood of illegal aliens into the United States continues unabated due to the tacit collusion of both major political parties. The handful of people who support secure borders are generally to be found among the Republicans, but most prominent members of the Republican Party shy away from taking any strong position on the issue, and some, like John McCain, are full-bore “amnesty” supporters.
The Democrats want the Mexicans in the country for the same reason that European Socialists want Muslims in the EU: they are a reliable vote for the socialist welfare state. They immediately become clients of a multitude of state services, from food stamps to Head Start, and can be used as poster-child victims to push through ever more liberal multicultural/socialist policies. Bring them in, make them citizens, hand them their Spanish-language ballots (or the ones with pictograms, for the illiterates), and you have another batch of permanent votes for unlimited socialism.
But why should Republicans collaborate in such a scheme, when it guarantees them perpetual minority status?
It’s an open secret that many large businesses depend on cheap Mexican labor — legal and illegal — to maintain their profitability. The process began decades ago with migrant labor in the Southwest, which entered the country to perform seasonal agricultural tasks — Cesar Chavez and his noble crusade made them into the first lionized “Chicano” victim group back in the 1970s. The agribusiness companies got stoop labor for half the minimum wage or less, and the owners were prominent donors to the Republican Party — no wonder the Republicans cashed the checks and kept their mouths shut.
This sort of corruption inhibited modernization and automation in the agriculture sector. If companies had had to hire Americans, the wage costs would have driven them to save money by investing capital in automation, and much of the stoop labor would have become obsolete. As it is, in Southern California much of the harvesting is done the same way that it always has been. Compare that with, say, Japan.
Over the next several decades the problem spread from the Southwest to the rest of the country. There is virtually no area of the United States which does not have its enclaves of Mexicans, legal and illegal, many of whom speak little or no English. Besides agricultural labor, they work for landscaping companies, construction firms, and other industries that require low-skill workers and are willing to pay in cash. The women work as nannies and maids.
- - - - - - - - -
There are plenty of them around here, in the heart of rural Virginia. One time I saw a busload of them parked in the corner of a parking lot in a small rural shopping center. The overseer — a “person of American background” — had gone into the store to buy drinks and lunch for his crew. The Mexicans stayed over by the edge of the woods, hundreds of yards away from any other cars or people in the parking lot. The overseer brought their lunch back to them, and they sat in the shade to eat it. Then back on the bus, and presumably back into the hot sun in a tobacco field somewhere not far away.
On the Eastern Shore of Virginia, back off the main road, I have seen the dormitories where Mexicans are housed. They are stark cinderblock buildings, similar to the accommodations you might expect in refugee camps. The likeness is enhanced by the chain-link fences that surround the compounds, with gates for the buses to go in and out. Other camps consist of trailer parks out in the middle of the fields, tiny plastic and metal boxes with no shade and no amenities whatsoever.
This is what Col. West is talking about. And all of it goes on with the full knowledge and collusion of public officials at the local, state, and national level. Many of these politicians are Republicans, and many of those receive campaign contributions from the major corporations that profit from helot labor. Here in Virginia, based on my personal experience, the principal beneficiaries are agribusiness, construction, landscaping, road repair, poultry processing, and the textile industry.
If a business — say a chicken-processing plant — is powerful enough locally, it can make certain that it gets plenty of advance warning of an inspection visit by immigration officials, so that only the Mexicans with green cards are visible on the assembly line when the feds poke their heads through the door.
This kind of corruption is endemic throughout the country, and it grows worse every year as more illegals pour in. It has the effect of depressing wages at the lower end of the scale, and working-class citizens who pay taxes see their incomes drop because of the competition from workers who pay no taxes at all.
A more serious problem, one that is harder to quantify, is the degradation of the civic culture at all levels that occurs when corruption like this permeates society. Everyone knows what is going on — from the poor to the wealthy, we all know what the game is. Everybody also knows what the rules are: anyone who complains or tries to change the situation is immediately demonized as a “racist”.
So the blue-collar people keep their mouths shut, out of prudence, but they know the score, and many of them hate Mexicans. Middle class people get their lawns mowed and their houses cleaned at bargain prices, and they live far from the crime-ridden immigrant enclaves, so their fastidious gaze may be averted from any of the direct consequences of what benefits them. Wealthy people who own large businesses obviously benefit from the dirt-cheap labor.
The Republican party is apparently willing to endure permanent minority status as long as its members continue to enjoy all the perks and privileges of office and the side-benefits that come with the continued support of businesses that profit from helotry.
So when Allen West inveighs against “big corporations” in this regard, he is attacking a modern American version of Mussolini-style syndicalism, the collaboration of business and government to their mutual benefit. Syndicalism breeds corruption, and the helot industry is one of the most corrupt aspects of modern syndicalism.
In other words, Col. West is not opposing capitalism; he is battling fascism.
It’s a quixotic task, and a huge portion of the Republican establishment will close ranks against him. But he’s a dedicated man, and he’ll keep at it He’s smart, well-educated — all that knowledge about Islam he picked up himself, from reading the same books we do — and has great integrity.
May God go with him.
12 comments:
I live in Iowa, not too far from Postville, IA, that was much in the news a couple of years ago when the immigration folks did raid a packing plant there. The plant was run by a family of New York Jews, with one or two family members living in Iowa to run the plant. They were doing exactly what the Baron has described.
When the plant was raided, a number of the illegals were deported, with some families being broken up in the process. This caused great anguish to everyone in the community. There was much economic loss to the community which by that time had come to rely on these people as as part of the economic base of the town (it is a very small town).
The principal manager was recently convicted of hiring illegals and sentenced to several years in prison if I recall correctly, all of which is very gratifying.
Baron states: "This is what Col. West is talking about. And all of it goes on with the full knowledge and collusion of public officials at the local, state, and national level."
In addition to the collusion of various American elements employing illegal aliens, the UN exerts it's influence with an entire industry spinning out of control . . .NGO's with immigration of 'refugees'.
From the excellent Refugee Resettlement Watch" blog, I quote:
* "In Fiscal Year 2009 the U.S. resettled almost three times as many refugees as all the rest of the countries in the industrialized world combined."
*"The Obama administration is committed to increasing the refugee quota, as was the Bush administration. Much of the political elite on both sides of the aisle and business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce want higher refugee admission numbers. (We maintain this is the case because they don’t really understand how the program has evolved.)"
*" In recent years up to 95% of the refugees coming to the U.S. were referred by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or were the relatives of UN-picked refugees. Until the late 90’s the U.S. picked the large majority of refugees for resettlement in the U.S.
Considering that the refugee influx causes increases in all legal and illegal immigration as family and social networks are established in the U.S., the U.N. is effectively dictating much of U.S. immigration policy."
Prince William County, Virgina has been on the ball on this issue for the past few years:
Three year old law in Virginia targets illegal immigrants much like Arizona's SB 1070
"PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY, VA (KOLD) - For the last three years, a county in Virginia has remained under the radar in the immigration debate even though it has a law almost identical to Arizona's immigration law.
The ordinance in Prince William County was passed in 2007. It initially required police to check the status of detainees they suspected of being undocumented immigrants but one year later it was revised.
Officers now question all criminal suspects about their immigration status once an arrest is made.
In 2008, the University of Virginia conducted a survey to see what effects, if any, the Prince William County law had. It concluded initial fears about racial profiling did not happen.
It also show that schools saw a drop in English as a second language enrollment. There was also a drop in uninsured mothers giving birth and individuals turned over to immigration and customs enforcement."
Its not just illegal immigration. In the past, when needed, the US has had moratoriums on legal immigration as well. It gives time for the new ones to assimilate, gives the nation a breather. Ending legal immigration, H-1B visas, and other tools used to shut out 'expensive' American workers also needs to happen. I suggest VDARE.com, which covers the question in more detail from a wide spectrum of views, from human biodiversity to environmentalism, there's a reason and pet issue for everyone to oppose any and all immigration, legal and illegal.
I applaud the Baron for mentioning it and addressing it, esp in the context of Colonel West's words.
Thank you Baron for summing up in a few paragraphs exactly what is going on here. If you want some real irony, check this out. My landlady hires a couple of illegal Mexicans to do the yard work and whatever else strikes her fancy. Once in awhile I chat with the one who speaks english. He said his nephew is in California but is now going to move east to live with him. Why is that I asked? "Not enough work. Too many Spanish people there". Notice how he said "Spanish people". Like the place has been over run with Castilian speakers. His own people are making it hard for the old illegals to find work. But he thinks nothing of what it is doing to Americans.
The huge flood of illegal aliens into the United States continues unabated due to the tacit collusion of both major political parties.
This collusion is central to the way that America has become a de facto one-party system. Bipartisan support for the notorious Z Visa should have set off endless alarm bells throughout America that the nation had been betrayed by its political elite.
Republicans, too long in the pocket of big business, have participated in giving America's income profile its hourglass shape. Wide at its minimum wage base, the midpoint neckdown reflects a near total war that is being declared on White America's middle class (the 50-100K$ earnings range), as executed through outsourcing, job exportation and H-1B visas. At its wide-again top is the swath of self-enriching corporate and incumbent political moguls who form a good-old-boy network that delights in concentrating nearly 90% of this nation's wealth in the hands of less than 10% of its population.
The Democratic Party's game is even more corrosive as they create a power based established upon nothing less than Mendicant Voter Plantations. They do this by recruiting entire generations of inner city residents that have become wholly dependent upon welfare. Illegal immigration only serves to swell the ranks of these economic gulags as new arrivals continue to erode the earning power of the job market’s bottom tiers.
America has become a one-party system of the almighty dollar and career politicians are the generals of this trench warfare that is being waged upon White Christian Western civilization. Nearly the exact same mechanism is operating in Europe with equally, if not more, devastating results.
Dr.D: When the plant was raided, a number of the illegals were deported, with some families being broken up in the process. This caused great anguish to everyone in the community.
Had it not been so predictable, that communal "anguish" would have been remarkable in its abject refusal to recognize how a good number of those families being "broken up" were obliged to do so because of their status as illegal aliens.
It is rather curious as to why a totally expectable byproduct of criminal behavior should manage to elicit such surprise and distress. Especially so when all principals involved were perfectly aware of the consequences they faced due to being in this country illegally.
There seems to be no sense of personal responsibility on the part of these illegal aliens for having put their entire families at risk of deportation. Instead, their dilemma is all the fault of some diabolical "system" or The Man™ rather than being a direct result of willfully violating America's immigration laws.
In the case of the Postville raid, I sadly report that the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and other churches all supported the illegals vigorously. They have accepted a warped concept of "Christian charity" that includes violation of the laws of the land as needed. It was truly a very un-Christian display of Leftism.
I am so weary of coming across this tabloid economics explanation for why right wing parties support unlimited immigration.
Consider the components of this absurd thesis.
Mythical evil genius fat cat spends millions of doubloons in donations to both parties just so he can hire a Mexican gardener, house cleaner or cook for 10 doubloons an hour for his mansion instead of a natural born American for, say, 50% more.
Or, taking it to the plantation level, this crazy genius, scheming, Machiavellian fat cat business tycoon will happily donate millions of doubloons to both the moonbats and the space monkeys to save spending comparatively piffling amounts of doubloons by hiring Mexicans rather than on the native born for a short harvest season or, better still, on specialised robots. They do exist, by the way and would eliminate a lot of industrial unrest, as well as work more efficiently.
A better explanation would be long standing bureaucratic inertia dating from the 1960s that eventually results in a crisis situation where both moonbats and space monkeys find themselves trapped into having to support unlimited immigration, legal and illegal, simply to avoid being tarred by the MSM - the real power brokers - with the ‘racist’ brush. The ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ is a trivial non problem in comparison.
In the meantime, under the elective junta system of government (here I refer to the so called democracies) that prevails in three or four dozen countries, nearly all of which have the same self inflicted uncontrolled immigration problem, the subject population has no means of forcing the political class, the judiciary or the supporting bureaucracy, to perform its duties at the most basic level of competence or even compliance with the law.
Members of the ruling elite in every elective junta are able to act as if they accountable to nobody simply because, for all intents and purposes, they are. All they really need to worry about is making sure that they don’t displease the reporters of the heavily left leaning media. The opinions of the people hardly ever need to be taken into account.
Providing the subject population with no genuine representation or meaningful political power is a design feature of the elective junta form of government, not a bug. A cursory review of utterances made by many of America’s original elitist group, its so called ‘Founding Fathers’, would illustrate this point quite clearly and also explain the mentality of an elite class when they devote themselves to devising something as important as, for example, a constitution.
Aquila, the problem is it's not just the "fat cats" who are driving this. A huge and growing percentage of our nation's work force are government employees. An absurd number of them are raking in over $100,000 per year.
Yes, your explanation of "bureaucratic inertia" describes a lot of this problem but there is still a significant amount of ongoing misconduct that boils down to conflict of interest and, with increasing frequency, just plain straight out corruption.
If you want a real conflict of interest issue, try the War on Drugs. Untold BILLIONS in government revenues await just the regulation and taxation of marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol. Yet, the interests (read: income) of law enforcement, the DEA, customs, big pharmaceuticals and criminal attorneys all resist such a sane move. Think how much of a boost the war on hard narcotics would get if marijuana legalization yanked the financial rug out from under the feet of drug lords around the world.
Some conservative estimates place California's penal system cost at 10% of the state's entire budget. Others range up to 25% or more and California is one of the top ten economies in the entire world.
Imagine the money we could save if nonviolent soft-core drug offenders that were only arrested for personal consumption could be released into electronically monitored custody. Some prison guards are pulling down well over $100,000 per year and union rules prohibit extra hiring that would help avoid costly overtime pay. And this is but one example of many that demonstrate the tremendous conflict of interest being upheld by our government.
Essentially, we have government for the sake of government. Additionally, there is an Ivy League elite of attorneys and MBAs (all indoctrinated in Politically Correct Multiculturalism), that have entrenched themselves in legislatures, court rooms and executive boardrooms across America and just about nobody has the power to eject them from their sinecures.
To be sure, the MSM plays a distinct role in helping reinforce this entire façade but even their insidious programming (in every sense of the word), does not adequately explain why so many people have bought into a system that is slowly corroding our Republic. As any good dectective will tell you when confronted with a case that is not a crime of passion:
FOLLOW THE MONEY.
http://www.wsbtv.com/video/23438021/index.html
OTM illegals video.
Just in case anyone's blood pressure is a bit too low, here is some information about government employees who are earning over $100,000 per year:
The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.
Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.
Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.
The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.
When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.
The trend to six-figure salaries is occurring throughout the federal government, in agencies big and small, high-tech and low-tech. The primary cause: substantial pay raises and new salary rules.
"There's no way to justify this to the American people. It's ridiculous," says Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a first-term lawmaker who is on the House's federal workforce subcommittee.
Jessica Klement, government affairs director for the Federal Managers Association, says the federal workforce is highly paid because the government employs skilled people such as scientists, physicians and lawyers. She says federal employees make 26% less than private workers for comparable jobs.
USA TODAY analyzed the Office of Personnel Management's database that tracks salaries of more than 2 million federal workers. Excluded from OPM's data: the White House, Congress, the Postal Service, intelligence agencies and uniformed military personnel.
The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal worker's pay to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector. [emphasis added]
Our government is devouring us alive. We have elected a bunch of cannibals to office.
Baron, I was always under the impression that the conservative preferred small business to big business.
But you're right - the collusion of corporations and government is fascism, and this is one thing that a proper conservative must fight.
A good post. Not so bad here in Oz (handy having an ocean for a border), not to mention we do generally get alarmed by the number of boat people (who may or may not count as refugees, but still jump the queue of refugees to get in here). But the same malaise exists at the top, unfortunately, much to the annoyance of the electorate.
And politicians wonder why we don't trust them...
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