The Long Branching of America

An 88 year old New Jersey man is about to be thrown out of his home. He is not a criminal. He is not in debt or defaulting on any payments. The home is his own. He is a war hero who served his country well. He lived a good life and wants nothing more than to live out the remainder of his years in his own home. Yet the Mayor insists that he and many others be thrown out of their homes.

Major American ports including those in New York and ports which the army uses to move military equipment and vehicles are about to be turned over to the control of an Arab company based out of Dubai. This sale will be funded by money raised from unknown sources. Though this directly endangers our security and puts millions of lives at risk, the President has threatened to use his veto against any attempt to prevent this takeover.

What is the connection between these two things? Between the lonely struggle of an old man in Long Branch, NJ and the vulnerable ports of a great nation. The faltering steps of a man who once strode the beaches of Normandy as a conquering hero and the massive ports through which an endless river of cargo flows to our shores.

The common denominator is greed. The Mayor of Long Branch, NJ allowed the Applied Development company to redevelop portions of the city without proper approval, selling properties to them at below market value with the approval of former disgraced Governor McGreevy. The head of Applied Development is now in jail for bribing Hudson County politicians but under his son, the plan goes forwards. The plan is to throw residents out of their homes through the illegal use of Eminent Domain and pay them a fraction of the value of their homes.

Meanwhile in Washington D.C. our beloved President mumbles through a few sentences that Dubai is our ally. Of course the President also assures us that Saudi Arabia is our ally as well. Its supporters retort that globalization is a reality and we cannot be perceived as alienating international trade. Similarly the supporters of Long Branch's project argue that they are only working to improve the city. At the heart of both of these situations is the reality that corporate interests and moneymaking trump law and morals once again.

What is the real reason for the terrorist threat that America, Europe and Israel face? The venomous murderous tenets of Islam certainly inspires the terrorists themselves but it is not what makes us vulnerable to them. Under normal circumstances Muslims would be an ocean away from us and no threat to us and the only domestic Arabs would be a handful of Lebanese Christians. The reason that France is burning, Holland and Sweden and Denmark are under siege and Israel is facing a war in its own borders is the greed of companies for cheap labor.

Immigration and Globalization do not cause terror as liberals like to argue, but they do enable the terrorists to strike at us. Our immigration policy is not some sort of noble edict as the rhetoric of politicians would like us to believe but is a policy meant to provide cheap labor. That is why the American Southwest is increasingly in danger and why Pakistani and Arab men with a hatred for America but a college degree can easily get a visa to come here. Companies like Microsoft and Yahoo are starved for technical employees, but the American brand are expensive, the Muslim brand imported on HB-1 visas (which computer companies constantly lobby Washington for) are dirt cheap.

The tech industry has created a huge demand for computer skills and at the same time enabled new levels of globalization. Everything is outsourced from your tax returns to your X-Rays. This allows otherwise backwards Muslim countries to receive our technological infrastructure and promotes an educational infrastructure that creates the middle class educated terrorists who go on to join Al-Queda and move to the US. The average terrorist does not sneak across the border, he buys a plane ticket.

We have a terrorist problem because of political correctness and we have political correctness because of cheap labor. Without the flood of third world immigration, the leftist multicultural crowd would have been nothing more than another stack of loonies. With it, they're well on their way to their dream of dismantling the United States and turning it into a socialist utopian paradise like Zimbabwe.

These same policies destroyed large parts of Long Branch NJ, with funding and legal support from Federal and State governments which provided special mortgages and funding and put legal requirements into place that ensured that neighborhoods would be transformed into decaying crime ridden areas subject to riots and drug dealers. By the time the economy rebounded the city's property values had been severely damaged and many of the residents put to flight, the politicians and the companies step in to develop a plan to 'save the city,' and dispose of the rest of the residents by seizing beachfront Victorian mansions and throwing a hundred grand at them and replacing them with high-rise condo developments. The politicians profit, the companies profit, the residents are sold out and thrown out.

Imagine this on a national scale and that is what is happening to America. Our economy and real estate have increasingly been turned over to foreign ownership. Bush's latest plan to bring in millions of Mexican workers on temporary visas or the move towards providing driver's licenses and government programs and possibly even voting rights to illegal aliens increasingly moves the US to a state of affairs in which citizenship has little meaning. Democrats support immigrations because in true Tammany Hall style is creates plantations of voters segregated from the mainstream who will vote Democrat because they're told the Republicans will eat their babies. Republicans ultimately support immigration because the major companies rely on cheap labor. Both are implementing Long Branch on a national scale for short term profit.

Today vulnerable ports are being turned over to the control of a company from a hostile state but that is merely the beginning. 9/11 rebuilding was turned over to an architect who had never built a skyscraper before and whose design was awful and utterly impractical merely because he shared a law firm with the Governor (who is now outraged about the ports, now that he's running for President.) Politicians churn out more and more senseless pork barrel projects and someone has to pay for it all. America has been living beyond its means for some time now and rather than practice fiscal responsibility, politicians are happy to sell out national interests by putting the golden calf of trade above all else.

In the name of trade, America is subject to the dictates of international organizations such as the WTO. In the name of free trade we got NAFTA and yet more American jobs shifting to Mexico. In the name of trade we have porous borders, widescale immigration and a revolving door for Saudis, including many of the 9/11 hijackers to enter the country at will. In the name of trade we're selling off our industry, first our manufacturing jobs, then our service industry and finally now even high end trained jobs. We rely on third world computer specialists, third world doctors and third world financial analysts and we do our best to ignore the
inevitable consequences.

Long Branch has been an American reality for some time now. American values have been evicted, America has been rezoned, its laws and principles warped and distorted and Americans thrown out from their positions all for the greed of businessmen. In the beginning they started with white slavery when they imported indentured servants to manage their tobacco plantations and then raped them and had their courts add years of service for the pregnancy. Then they turned to black slavery which was only stopped not when they gained morality but when the Northern Industrial Revolution made the old southern economy obsolete and the difference was settled in a civil war with hundreds of thousands dead. The new slaves were immigrants from Europe working in factories, often from childhood, and living in urban tenements and beholden to the Democratic party machines of the ward. And then the industrial factory model became obsolete too. Now slavery is outsourced. It is easier for Nike to pay 8 cents to a Guatemalan boy to make sneakers than to try to do the same thing in America. The same outraged liberals who call for boycotting Israel don't organize divestment and boycotts of companies that use child labor because their own middle class living standards depend on it.

The history of the United States is a struggle between principle and commerce and much of the time commerce has won out because businessmen have the resources and the drive and the ambition to get their way. The American revolution didn't happen when the patriots wanted it to. They were dismissed as extremists and denounced for their calls for independence. It was when King George III began interfering with business that the businessmen joined up and the revolution took off. The Civil War was a conflict between Northern industrial based commerce and Southern land based commerce. America entered WW2 when the oil embargo it had imposed on Japan for invading China and disrupting Pacific business by acting like one of the European powers touched off a war. Never mind WW1 which was fought over dividing the Ottoman Empire.

At the time though exploitative, the drive of business to expand frontiers and territories benefited America by expanding America's horizons into newer lands. After WW2 American business though increasingly became global and developed a diminishing allegiance and affinity for America. Corporations advocated Globalism Uber Alles, corporations merged with foreign companies and were willing to sacrifice American interests to foreign ones, if it served their bottom line.

Jobs and industry began to migrate from America to foreign countries where doing business was cheaper and lacked any of the regulations meant to protect workers that had been enacted in America. As the prosperity of the average American grew, companies first profited handsomely by selling to a newly prosperous post-war public but increasingly strove to sell to that public while increasing their profit margins by finding cheaper labor to employ than the American public. The logical end of this now leaves us outsourcing almost everything to foreign countries and companies who through their lobbies pressure politicians to sell out American interests to corporate ones.

What is good for America is no longer what is good for GM. Companies want a weaker dollar to benefit their exports, which the Bush administration has given them. Companies want America to weaken its national policies so that American companies can freely do business in Europe and the Muslim world, without the stigma of Americanism attached to them. Companies want America to pander to foreign dictators to ease their way. Companies are happy to see American sovereignty parceled up and carved up because they see genuine Americanism as an obstacle to their ambitions and so they redefine Americanism as greed, as hedonism, as Hollywood and irresponsibility and liberalism. These they can then market abroad and at home and sell much better than patriotism or loyalty. They want a toothless blind nation that takes in as much cheap labor as they want and exports all the cheap industry they need. They have no use for the American people except as customers and companies put on a smiling face for their customers while cheating them out of every penny.

American interests, American pride, American government and the American economy and industry have been carved up and sold off for decades now while the message broadcast to the American people is 'Don't worry, be Happy." Ignore the deficits, ignore the economic unsustainability, ignore how many of your jobs have gone overseas and how much less a dollar buys than it used to. Ignore the vanishing values and the growing corruption of your children for profit.

This is only to be expected when dealing with companies which have long abandoned values and customer appreciation in favor of short term profits and inflating executive salaries while deflating product value. But it is our political system that by selling out to companies and putting their interests first endangers the survival of the United States.

The Federal Government has been encouraged to spend without accountability, to pile pork on pork, not as a perk but as the process of legislation itself in which politicians trade off pork for pork to get their pork through. Politicians have grown increasingly insulated from the public, interacting with special interest groups and lobbyists instead of their constituents, between elections. The Long Branching of America is the final outcome of that. Corrupt detached politicians melding with business interests to sell off whatever is left to sell.

Bill Clinton boasted of building a bridge to the 21st century. Unfortunately that bridge has long since been sold.