My tea this morning is perfect. As Premier of China and head of government and the State Council, I seldom get a bad cup of tea. The intra-party struggles have been resolved. We seem to be managing that burst of inflation that reared its head in the economy. Our balance of payments continues to grow spectacularly in our favor. Things are fine. We need to open up credit a bit more, but generally we are on our way. Why do I feel so odd, then?
Monthly Archives: November 2011
Gingrich: The Newt Slaveholder
Newt Gingrich is at it again. He sat down for an interview yesterday with CNN and repeated the idea that most of the world ridiculed when he offered it at the most recent Republican presidential debate. The notion that local panels or juries would decide the fate of immigrants who are in the country illegally boggles the mind. But he is serious. He apparently believes that citizens other than hate-filled, blood-thirsty bigots would serve on the local boards.
Gingrich would have us believe, too, that such a system could be built. The mountains of files, the numbers of lawyers, the need to hire experts to verify piles of paper – the whole thing is an unworkable mess. Come to think of it already exists. It used to be called the INS.
However unseemly and unmanageable his idea, Gingrich presses on. His new system would never, ever grant citizenship or voting rights to the immigrant community – even after 25 years of lawful and productive existence.
You would think that someone from Georgia – especially someone who seeks to convince the public that he was paid $100 million to provide “historical perspective” to corporate interests after he left the Speakership – would know the definition of slavery.
Feel free to forward these blogs that deal with topics on business on Mondays, politics on Wednesdays and social and personal and professional development issues on Fridays. Additional thoughts are published invariably in between on Tuesdays or Thursdays.
What Luck!
Newt Gingrich’s proposal for local citizen juries to decide which of the individuals illegally in the country gets to stay is of course nuts. Why even discuss it? The arguments against it are monumental. The idea is being laughed at across the board and it shows one of the reasons Gingrich would be an excellent choice for Republicans to nominate as their candidate for president – if they want to lose in a landslide.
Seeing Growth in Ourselves
In the midst of the economic recession and the failure of the super committee to begin fixing the federal budget, it is not surprising that households and businesses across the nation harbor doubt and perhaps a defeatist attitude about the future.
But HispanicLatino households of all sizes – and business owners in particular – might do well to consider a contrarian approach, a strategy that nets returns by going against the current grain. Contrarian thinking requires perceiving the future differently.
The Thankful Tortilla
So tomorrow the ubiquitous flour tortilla is all but ignored. For an entire year, day in and day out, it carries within its fragile walls our lowly bean, our stout potatoes, our lofty hopes. The tortilla tomorrow gives way for one day at least to dark and rich wheat rolls, buttery biscuits and melting loaves of white bread. Not a bad trade for a day of true thanksgiving.
But come Friday morning, the tortilla will again take on its burden and enfold our very sustenance within its hold. Yet it seems unfair, after so much toil and labor month after month, week after week, day after day, that it is relegated on the eve of our national thanksgiving to second chair on the operatic stage of family get-togethers.
Prelude to the Past: In Defense of Anglo Rights
What happens, asked then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when she served on the Supreme Court, to laws designed to defend minority rights when minorities become majorities? At issue was the Court’s Grutter v. Bollinger decision in 2003 on using some racial preferences in college admissions – a tool that would be unnecessary if we lived in a truly equal society.
Turning Back History
The long arc of the immigration story has gotten us here, literally. Yet on one hand, the demographic and economic forces which are structural in nature and in place have led to the assertion of immigration as a population change agent. Immigration, as it has always, is adding to the population of the country and changing it in the process.
On the other hand, the countervailing sentiment is also asserting itself, so that states like Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana and Texas are leading the equally natural anti-immigrant reaction.
All the World’s a Soccer Ball
The sight astounded my friend Tony. He had entered another world far, far different than anything he had experienced. I had warned him. He did not believe it when I told him what to expect. He had been to stately Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., before, but not for anything like this. In many ways that day for me in 1978 was when the modern era of globalization became real, although its forces were already underway.
Little did we know then that the arguments among the Chinese elites were underway on whether or how to bring China out of its communist shell into the real world. Only six years prior, Richard Nixon had astounded the world by travelling to Peking to set off the debate. Three decades later, the world has changed, so that Beijing ranks as important as Washington. Continue reading
Not Armageddon Yet
The Wall Street Journal hid the woman’s face. Not the usual journalistic fare you see on a Greyhound bus between Austin and Dallas. The WSJ is more likely found zipping above us on American Airlines on a 35-minute flight. She sat to my left, within the peripheral range of my one good eye.
Every other week or so when I board the bus to go 220 miles in four and a half hours instead of three by road I resolve to fly the next time or to break down and get a car. If I get the smallest car on the market, I can minimize my carbon footprint. But I then think, regardless of the size of the car, about the number of people who would be at risk. Oh, I can drive. Recently in a rented car with a package of insurance that could have bailed out the Greek economy, I managed to navigate more than 300 miles safely. But I still shudder when I think about the old lady I almost ran over with my truck on my way to Christmas Eve Mass at Saint Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington years ago. The police rightfully would have concluded it was her fault but had I better vision I would have been able to react more quickly.
Behind the WSJ woman, a young man sat fidgeting, his face turned brackish, or perhaps crackish, and dark by either a hard life or drugs or both. A diamond ring in the ear of an NFL linebacker strutting his masculinity on television on Sundays no longer comes off as improbable. On a somewhat youngish man who should weigh another 10 or 15 pounds, his stoned ear suggests the rest of him might be too.
Thinking Beyond the Recession
An unforgiving national unemployment rate of nine percent and stagnant – or declining – wages for the average household for the last ten years dominate the minds of Americans worried about the economy. As important is the number of business closings, though it seldom gets the same amount of ink. More than 1.5 million businesses have closed since the start of the current recession. A high unemployment rate and extenuated business closures feed off each other in an economy with little demand. Continue reading