(We) can do better

Is Canada's perpetual shortage of skilled labour real, perceived or conjured up for the purposes of creating a glut? In the case of engineers, the latter would certainly seem to be the case. We have been graduating thousands more engineers than needed when considered in the context of the deliberate import of engineers from the rest of the world, mainly developing world. Many are driving taxis, including Canadians, and many Canadian engineers who aren't have left for the United States because the glut has driven down wages here. My nephew graduated from four years of training in marine engineering three years ago. He has spent half the time since working as a non-union construction labourer and the other half in the Coast Guard for about $25 per hour, or as much money as an inexperienced painter. Only now has he secured a tenuous position in the company he was aiming to work for. I was in my local drugstore today telling one pharmacy assistant about Bill Gates' latest scam. The H-1B visa program has allowed him and other technology companies to hire IT workers from India, China and similar locales on a two-three year contract in such numbers as to drive down the wage levels of Americans in the industry. People who are trained to earn $100,000 a year are earning $60,000 a year and many who hit 40 find themselves without a job. One of them, Gene Nelson, who graduated with a Phd in 1979 in computer engineering, is now having to file for personal bankruptcy. But this isn't enough for Gates and his colleagues in the industry. Currently there is a cap on H-1B visas and he wants it raised to the sky. Why? Because there is a "shortage" of skilled labour in the field. If this were the case, which it isn't, that would be easily remedied. Gates and others could create a "longage" of salaries to attract more IT graduates. He himself has admitted that IT salaries have not kept pace with inflation. But instead he has run to Congress demanding changes to H-1B. When he didn't get it, what did he do? He went to Vancouver to announce the creation of a Microsoft plant in Richmond where IT workers from India and China and elsewhere could be hired by the bushel under Canada's "Temporary Workers Visa". Good old Canada, no caps there. Gates can and will hire a surplus of these bargain basement brains----none from Canada no doubt-----for one devious reason. Under the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) these "temporary workers" will simply be able to take a car trip through American Customs and be in Microsoft headquarters in two hours. So much for the H-1B "cap". It was at this point the Pharmacist interjected. Colleen had been working long hours, six days a week, year after year, unassisted in her store. She explained that she had tried many times to find another pharmacist to help her, but no one would reply to her advertisements because pharmacists in Vancouver and across the province were working similar hours to hers. That was because, she said, there was a shortfall of 600 pharmacists nationally and 300 in BC. "How did this come to pass?" I asked. "It began with the tuition freeze imposed by the Provincial BC social-democratic government on colleges and universities in the 1990s." (Presumably emulated by other governments as well). The freeze was a sop thrown to its working class constituency that on the face of it was positive because it made post-secondary education more affordable to lower-income students. However, by depriving the educational institutions of revenue, it forced them to cut back the construction of labs or the acquisition of equipment for training, the number of instructors hired, the number of courses offered and the number of placements available. "The result was fewer students graduated in pharmacology." Colleen pointed out that Ontario and a few other provinces were now trying to close the gap by training more students. It is not simply a matter of making tuition affordable but investing more money in the whole training system. In the meantime though, she said, immigrant pharmacists are a welcome relief. Her attitude was shared by area residents last year when a petition made its rounds to demand that the federal government allow a South African doctor to stay in the country. Doctors are in extremely short supply in the hinterland. Some people simply can't find a General Practitioner. And South African doctors have the reputation of being the very best, even if their bedside manner is brusque. But here is the irony. After the effective public lobby, the doctor won his stay in Canada, and then pulled up stakes and moved to a more urbanized setting. As long as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees freedom of movement, how then can immigration ever solve shortages of this kind, when medicare fee structures prevent monetary incentives from being offered to hold personnel.? We are caught in a vicious cycle. Immigrant-driven population growth drives economic growth (eg.demand for housing, construction materials, roads, automobiles etc). And economic growth in turn creates labour shortages, which beg for immigration to fill them because its a quicker, cheaper fix than long-term educational investment. The public, meanwhile, not only demand the quick fix for the very real shortfalls they see, but buy into the mythology that immigration must always be the answer for these chronic problems. And of course, no thought is ever given to the idea of putting our economic and social needs within a framework of ecological sustainability. Along with, "How many pharamicists and doctors do we need to import?" should be questions like, "Should we poach them from developing countries?", and more importantly, "How many immigrants, how many people, can the environment of this country sustain?" Canada is a sugar-addict. Needing energy (skilled labour), we reach for a candy bar (immigration) and wolf it down. Within minutes, we not only feel relief but hyperactivity. But soon the insulin kicks in, and we crash, either into a recession or another severe shortage of labour (sugar). Ingest another candy bar and the cycle continues. Anything to keep the immigration rush going. From 16 million people in 1950 to 33 million people today in 2008. Unless we break this addiction to growth, our health will break. We must stabilize ourselves and shed some demographic weight. We have our work cut out for us. Tim Murray See also Immigration myths demolished by economics journalist

Article also published on candobetter.wikispaces.com web site for James Sinnamon's campaign site or Lord Mayor of Brisbane

It is not only renters and home buyers who are suffering from rising land values these days.

Three years ago Latrobe Street Paddington was run down. However, a number of hard-working local businesspeople have set up retail stores there and, in doing so, changed its character. Businesses include the Urban Grind coffee shop, which attracts loyal customers from as far away as The Gap, the Green Tangerine women's accessories store, the Mary Rose Gift Shop, Pet Supplies and the Biome organic life-styles store. These businesses have striven to sell locally produced products in preference to cheaper overseas imports. They have worked cooperatively and have been in the practice of making joint trips interstate in order to obtain merchandise.

Now, as reported in the Westside News local newspaper of 20 February 2008₁ these businesses have become victims of their own success. Landlords have recently demanded rent increases which have forced four of these businesses to close down and threatened the viability of two more. The annual rent of Urban Grind, which will be closing down, was increased from $42,420 to $59,943 in one hit. Another's rent was raised from $54,000 to $90,000 and the rent for a business in nearby Given Terrace was raised from $89,000 to a staggering $228,000. Local real estate agents have actively encouraged landlords in raising these rents.

This business community fears that this will be the start of a trend which could see the whole character of Latrobe Street changed as chain stores move in.

A group to fight to preserve the Latrobe Street retail community has been set up, but will not be able to save four of the businesses from being closed down. Whilst legal avenues to challenge these sudden rent increases exist, they simply did not have the resources to utilise them.

How to end fleecing of small businesses by landlords?

At a public meeting at Bardon Hall on 20 February, all three local candidates contesting for the Brisbane City Council Ward of Toowong expressed sympathy and pledged to do what they could to help. Sitting Liberal Councillor, Peter Matic, somewhat at variance with prevailing philosophy of the Liberal Party, suggested that the businesses form a union. Other local government candidates in attendance who showed sympathy for the Latrobe Street retailers included Yvonne Li from the Labor Party and Anne Bocabella from the Greens.

However, how these businesses can ultimately hope to prevail against the economic forces that are increasing the value of the land under their feet is hard to envisage unless legislators are prepared to tackle those forces head on.

The rent hikes faced by the traders are part of the price to be paid for the runaway property boom of recent years. The wealth gained in this boom did not fall out of the sky. Rather, it had to have been taken out of the pockets of other Australians.

Objectively, property speculation is of no benefit to the Australian community as a whole. Accordingly, Brisbane City Council, as well as state and federal government policy, should be aimed at reducing, rather than increasing its scope within our economy. Furthermore, they should cease actively fuelling real estate hyper-inflation by allowing record levels of overseas immigration. Whilst immigration proponents like to pretend that they are motivated by lofty motives of compassion for new arrivals seeking to begin a new life, the reality is that they want high levels of immigration₂ to drive up the demand for real estate.

Interim measures to mitigate the effects of rising land values could include:

• Local, state and federal governments becoming the landlords themselves and cut out from the equation, private landlords. Governments, as far a possible, must retain every piece of property they currently own with a view to making these available to suitable small businesses.
• Set up a Council funded fighting fund, so that businesses, such as Urban Grind, which do have good prospects of legally challenging excessive rent increases within relevant government jurisdictions, can do so.

For my part, if elected on Saturday 15 March I will adopt these and whatever other other measures I am able to in order to curb such excesses on the part of rapacious landlords.

James Sinnamon
Candidate for Lord Mayor of Brisbane in the 2008 elections

Footnotes

1. Boom to Bust, Westside News 20 Feb08, page 1

2. For example, refer to "An inconvenient truth about rising immigration" by Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald of 3 Mar 2008.

REALITY AS A LINGUISTIC FILTER OF GROWTHISM

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thought-crime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it."  A character in Orwell's 1984.

Acquiring a language I think is like taking a trip to the optometrist. You see the world broadly if somewhat less sharply at a certain range and then the doctor places a lens in front of your eyes. Suddenly what you were looking at becomes clearer. But at a cost. The perimeter is less clear. That lens is your native language and you don't recall the trip to the optometrist because it seems you've always worn glasses.

If you acquire an advanced degree, or pursue a certain profession, you find that another lens is placed in front of that one too. That lens may be the obfuscatory jargon of the law profession, a scientific discipline, law enforcement, or economics, for example. This lens will allow you to see one area of life with even more clarity and precision than commonplace vision, but a cost. Vital information about life will fall out of focus.

If in the pursuit of higher education, or foreign travel, you gain fluency in a foreign language, you find that all these lenses will be cast aside in favour of a new one-the new language. Objective reality may remain the same, but the classification system of each language-its structure, substance, gender, number, time and vocabulary assist the users to perceive the world in a certain way, but also limit that perception. To speak a different language is to think in that language and therefore to think differently because you perceive only what your language allows you or pre-disposes you to perceive. Your language shapes your world view because it acts as blinkers. Speakers of different languages, therefore, have different world views. People do not live in an objective world, but one where we are at the mercy of languages as both as a medium of expression and filters that admit only selected parts of reality into our consciousness.

As a university student I was struck by the fact that students who majored in various other disciplines seemed to inhabit perceptual solitudes that made cross-disciplinary communication difficult at best. It wasn't simply the fact that each sector of students were informed by a different knowledge base, or even that each student spoke the idiom of his field of study, but that that idiom , that jargon, did not give him the conceptual tools to interpret information from another student's area of study. Fostering cross-disciplinary discussion in this academic Tower of Babel seemed a more daunting task than arranging a conference at the United Nations.

It would seem obvious that some languages would be more equipped or more handicapped at describing certain concepts or objects and that if it was an environmental requirement to describe them adeptly a speaker of that language would be able to discern them more ably. He would not only be able to report his experience with the right linguistic ammunition, but experience it differently. This linguistic construction on experience can be illustrated by an example drawn from within a language, that is, between an American and a British dialect. Let me contrast the way I experienced a Wimbleton tennis match , the same match, as mediated by American English and then by British English. Two languages, one event, two realities.

The loquacious American commentators were incapable of saying anything with economy. One sportscaster would spend 60 seconds fumbling for words in an attempt to explain why the favourite was not at the top of his game, while his BBC counterpart tersely remarked "the champion lacks resolve." What was so extraordinary about the British telecast was the silence. Often four, six points would go by before a soft and carefully enunciated crisp British voice would say "extraordinary shot, that", reminding me that there were indeed commentators viewing the action. The long interludes of silence between volleys would allow me to become part of the match. I would hear the swells of crowd noise, the soft pop of the racquets striking the balls and the drama of the event, reminding me of how differently the two language styles could frame the experience. I didn't hear the over-the-top American superlatives. Instead of "blistering returns" there were "imaginative replies", a badly hit shot was "an awkward ball", a "killer" volley was a "clever bit of improvisation" and a temper tantrum was described as "a piece of patented brinkmanship." For Americans, silence is a dreaded void to be filled with flat-screen TVs that pollute every bar. That point here is, the spectator experiences the same sporting event quite differently in the Queen's English than he does in the version across the Atlantic.

The concept of language as a kind of lens or filter, or even straitjacket, cannot be over-stated. Wittgenstein said that the limits of language are the limits of one's world. By that token, bilingual or multilingual people have broader vision. It is not what we look at, the poverty, the injustice, the overpopulation, the environmental degradation, that is paramount. But the linguistic construction built in to filter that reality, to bring it into sharp focus, or make us blind to it.

The question becomes then, whose lens are we wearing? What filter are we looking through? How do we remove it?

In 1984 George Orwell revealed that the purpose of Newspeak, the language of his fictional totalitarian regime, was to rid old English (Oldspeak) of all adjectives and unnecessary words so that people would be not be able to feel or think. If one could not describe sadness, one could not feel it, and if there was no word for democracy or justice  one couldn't complain about the government. By eliminating words, Newspeak would eliminate the range of thoughts.

Lancaster University's Professor Tony McEnery concluded that computer games and MP3 players have accomplished much the same thing in teenagers. ("Technology Isolation Syndrome"). His 2006 study of speech, blogs and questionnaires found that teenagers used half the average words of 25-34 year olds and that 20 words accounted for a third of their speech.

It looked for a time that a subtle totalitarian language would emerge from the Human Potential Movement in California in the 1970s. As R. D. Rosen dubbed it, "Psychobabble" was a mode of confession "that confessed nothing" and in its attempt to escape the confining vocabulary of Freudianism it substituted a jargon that had no theoretical roots. But it gave way to a puritanical tsunami that swept over every major institution in the English speaking world. "Political correctness". It's objectives are classically Orwellian. The notion is that if we don't label people or things by conventionally harmful terms, then people will desist from thinking of them in those terms. And if politically acceptable euphemisms are substituted and repeated ad nauseum, the ideological brain-transplant will be completed. Whilst dangerous, some politically correct neologisms can be quite funny.

For example, the homeless are now the "involuntarily undomiciled". And a drunk is "a person of differing sobriety." While a junkie is merely someone with pressing pharmacological preferences. Someone who is untrustworthy is just "ethically disoriented" while a lazy man is only "motivationally deficient". Someone chronically late is "temporally challenged" and a prostitute is not a streetwalker or a whore but a "sex care provider" presenting themselves as a commodity allotment with a business doctrine. As a white man, I am a "mutant albino genetic-recessive global minority", and the diction I practice is in reality just the style and writing imposed upon the world by "patriarchal white lexicographers." Standard English is "capitalistic patriarchal hegemonic discourse."

Each vested interest and lobby now seems to have its own "politically correct" euphemisms. The Pentagon were groundbreakers in this respect. A "clean" bomb was a nuclear device or neutron bomb that kills people but leaves infrastructure intact. Civilian deaths could be disguised as "collateral damage". Assassination is "wet work", bombs that hit civilians as "incontinent ordinance". Dead soldiers are just "non-operative personnel or "terminally inconvenienced" or "non-viable". Bombing an unintended target like a hospital could be dismissed as an "accidental delivery of ordinance equipment." And military failure, like President Carter's ill-fated Iranian desert raid, could be termed as an "incomplete success."

Ministers of Labour, meanwhile call their union-busting legislation "right to work" laws and the scabs that are used to break strikes are accorded a more morally sanitized name, "replacement workers". Trade union officials that haven't the guts to tell their membership that they calling for amnesty for 'illegal' workers instead say they wish to "regularize" them. And they are not illegal, they are undocumented, even though they used forged documents to get into the country. Finance Ministers call the stock market crash "an equity retreat" and warn we may experience "negative economic growth". Couldn't use the word "contraction" if it killed them. Conservation officials call the mass slaughter of wild animals "game management" and the Environment Ministry describes the explosive destruction of a nuclear reactor core like Chernobyl's as a "core management event".

The nuclear industry has conducted its own unique detoxification of plain English. An explosion is an "energetic dissembly" and a fire is "rapid oxidation". Plutonium contamination is "infiltration" and a reactor accident is to be referred to as a "normal aberration". "Spin" is a new breed of deceit three decades in the making which attempts to effect damage control by the use of euphemisms. And what are euphemisms essentially but a kind of linguistic Demerol to diminish painful truth by re-labeling it.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is gifted in that department. They once decided to sanitize their lexicon by banishing the "hazard" because it allegedly triggered panic in the American public. Health "hazards" were not to be mentioned and the Office of Hazardous Emergency Response was re-established as the "Office of Emergency and Remedial Action". And Enforcement Personnel became the more friendly "Compliance Assistance Officers".

But it is in Growthism where language makes it most incursive, dangerous and decisive intervention in the determination of what we perceive to be real today. The ideology that economic and population growth is beneficial, necessary and inevitable prevails, to a large extent, because the language which mediates that message has colonized academic forums, radio and television studios and print media. Consequently the reality of environmental Armageddon is seen by the audience through rose coloured glasses that are worn by the presenters, their guests and researchers and tinted by the vocabulary they use to interpret that reality. The audience therefore never sees or hears that every economic "boom" is an environmental "bust" and only comes to know "growth" via positive connotations.

For example, when Statistics Canada released its Census Report in mid March of 2007, those localities like British Columbia and Alberta which gained people from the previous census, were anointed census "winners" by the media as if a prize was going to be awarded for more pollution, GHG emissions, congestion, farmland and habitat loss. Prince Rupert, BC and Saskatchewan, on the other hand were designated as census "losers" for having fewer people than five years before. Newscasters consistently report that Canada "enjoyed" record growth or that the Maritimes "suffered" a "stagnant" economy with "sluggish" housing starts. The concept that Canadians might "enjoy" a steady state economy that didn't cover arable land and habitat with subdivisions is foreign to news script writers.

The word "growth" itself has undergone many makeovers in recent years to make it palatable to those of us who wouldn't swallow it otherwise. Growth has become "managed growth", "deflected growth", "smart growth", and the ultimate oxymoron, "sustainable growth". It seems that urban planners concoct a new label every year for the same snake oil it. To preserve all those wonderful green spaces that we love, planners propose to cram more and more of us into smaller and smaller urban compartments. But if we don't like sprawl, we like density even less. So Great Vancouver planners tried to package it under the name of "compaction". When ratepayers wouldn't buy into that garbage, planners re-marketed it under the label "Coreplan". No dice. Now its back as "Eco-density". Density with green paint over it. The one name you won't ever hear from planners though is "growth-control". That is outside their frame of reference.

Our culture abounds with so many sweet-sounding buzzwords like "sustainable", "livable". "affordable", "diverse", "vibrant", "inclusive", "pro-active", "choice" ---the vocabulary of deceit. Attach these adjectives to anything you want to sell or run past the planning objectors---any self-serving development scam for example---and you can jam it through as easily as candy down a baby's hatch.

The filter of growthist language in Anglophone societies is combined with the filter of multiculturalism---a smokescreen of left-wing tolerance that cloaks the right wing development agenda. Cultural diversity is much like a leaky air mattress that can only be kept afloat by constant pumping, the air being people from abroad. The language of diversity and tolerance is thus recruited to rationalize the policy of mass immigration and economic growth, always couched in the most positive terms. Growthism and Multiculturalism are a lexical duopoly.

How then do we remove their lens? The first answer is to substitute it with our lens. Ecological economists are attempting to do just that by developing indices of real economic performance, as if the planet mattered. We have to continually challenge media terminology and offer our own. When the CBC boasts that the country is diverse we counter by saying that is culturally fragmented and has lost cohesion.  When the CBC says that immigration is the solution we have to demand that they prove that there is a problem. When the CBC states that the population of Newfoundland has stagnated we must declare that it has stabilized.

The second answer is to be found in the pages of Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception": "We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems: for it is by means of them and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively, but at the same time we must preserve and if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through the half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too-familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction."

Huxley is not suggesting that we abandon symbolic reasoning, but broaden our perception to grasp the real and not just its symbols, so we can appreciate the relationship of words and things. Words are, after all, just a proxy for experience, a shorthand to build or explore new avenues. Better to imagine how a piano could be carried up a staircase than try by trial and error. But conceiving and planning are not to be confused with the actual lifting of the piano. Words are not to be confused with reality, nor lifeless abstractions with life itself. Objective reality is not a linguistic construction.

When I was 19 years of age, under controlled clinical conditions, I walked through one of Aldous Huxley's doors of perception, and I saw a reality that four years of intense undergraduate study had not shown me. The experience was very much like a journey, or "trip" to use the vernacular of the time, and it yielded insights that I have never had before or since. My brother was administered the same psychotropic, and it changed his worldview irrevocably. He abruptly quit his good career and moved his family into a 42 foot boat that he built at the back of his home, abandoned urban life and consumerism and spent the rest of his days close to wilderness. His decision recalled a comment by Carlos Casteneda: "Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have little influence in altering the course of our lives."

It is ironic that mescaline is classified as an hallucinogenic drug, for surely it is those who believe that infinite growth can continue on a finite planet who are hallucinating. I would speculate that if somehow mescaline was dispensed on a mass scale the grip of Madison avenue would be broken and the concept of destabilizing society and nature to chase higher profit margins would seem absurd. So far, only North American indigenous peoples are permitted the use of peyote to embark on vision quests.

Some might be outraged by any suggestion here of advocacy of pyschodelics. I oppose the recreational use of drugs and would prefer that people employ deep meditation and study to expand their minds. But I suspect that more damage is done by benzodiazepines than was ever done by "acid". Did some have bad trips and go mad?. In my entire campus life I never heard of one, but I'll take your word for it. I have, however, heard of many people dying of an anaphylactic shock from eating a peanut, or of liver cancer from alcoholism, and they all died unenlightened. And I have read of 3-4 billion people who will die in a generation if there is not a radical change of consciousness. No matter, this is quite academic. Mescaline therapy won't happen. The point here was only to say that stripped of language, a new understanding and a set of new insights can be revealed.

There is a dormant awareness that can be awakened, but the filters must first be removed, the lens put aside. It might take a psychedelic experience, an emotional upheaval or shock or a reality-mediated revelation like the long emergency of resource depletions and ecological collapse, but the consciousness which now seems set in concrete and apparently needs a jackhammer to break apart will indeed emerge. Whether it will be in time to save us is doubtful. In the meantime, all we can do is appeal to the limited awareness that people have using an alternative vocabulary to the one they have been given, or in the words of population sociologist Sheila Newman, exploit that "chink left in peoples' consciousness and expose those marketed absurdities as shimmering but empty dust motes in the mad attic of culturally induced agnosia."

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
March 1/08

The Shunning of Immigration Critics by the BBC, ABC and CBC. See also CBC Townhall meeting to be stacked with immigration advocates The Shunning of Immigration Critics by the BBC, ABC and CBC By Tim Murray, director of Immigration Watch Canada Thursday, 28 February 2008 Originally published by Canada Free Press (canadafreepress.com) Is there something endemic in state broadcasting in the Anglophone world which makes the population question taboo and the pro-immigration stance the default position? Is there an intrinsic bias, and if so, where is it coming from? The journalists, the presenters, the researchers, the producers or the higher-ups? Is state media more captive of political correctness than the private media? In attempting to answer some of these questions it is thought useful to first review two fascinating accounts, one about the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC), another about the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC) and finally a short summary of the disgraceful record of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In "The Treason of the BBC" the late Jack Parsons argued that "The BBC has been systematically excluding virtually all material on the question of basic population policy." This while "our present government has adopted a policy (without discussion or mandate) of deliberately increasing our numbers by about one million every five years," making Britain the fastest growing country in Europe with a population density almost twice that of China. Yet the BBC allowed Beverly Hughes, Minister of Immigration, to "blandly repeat, unchallenged, the government's mindless policy of continued mass immigration to meet the alleged needs of the economy." Much in the same way that Home Secretary Charles Clark was granted a free pass to say that there were 'no obvious limits' to net migration and rapid growth. Parsons asks, "How can BBC claims about the carrying capacity of the prison system and its "overpopulation" be made so openly, so effortlessly, so devoid of fear and moral opprobrium, while not the slightest hint can ever be allowed to slip out vis a vis the vastly more important case of the carrying capacity and numbers of the nation as a whole?" He is not accusing those who run the BBC of criminal activity but "colluding in a very Great Betrayal, fostering the myth that human numbers have so little consequence that there is no need to take them seriously." "The charge I am leveling at all executive levels of the BBC as a corporate body concerns what I am convinced is coercive, institutionalized bias which for years has prevented virtually all BBC news of, and discussion about, a literally vital object, the long-term balance between human numbers, resources and the quality of life.this was not always so, but has been the case for at least 15 years. The signs of population myopia were apparent to Parsons in 1967 when he asked the BBC why it was so concerned about the Tory Canyon oil-tanker spill disaster but so unconcerned about the doubling of the world's population in 30 years. Since the early seventies "a steady and insidious process among governing circles, opinion-formers, the greater bulk of the media, including the BBC, has built a powerful and near universal censorship, by consent that the absolutely fundamental ecology question, the need for a sustainable balance between numbers and resources---is almost totally ignored. The sad corollary of this is that mass migration---since it has a major and obvious impact on the overall population situation---cannot be rationally discussed either." Parsons, in a letter to a BBC Complaints Unit, asks, "Dare one hope that, one of these days, someone in the higher echelons of the BBC will screw his/her courage to the sticking point and actually issue and follow through on a set of instructions that free the BBC---and hence the nation-from this appalling and near-totally disabling taboo." He is given to wonder "Why does this large, wealthy, powerful, highly prestigious institution cringe so abjectly at the very idea of free speech in the realm of discourse?" And why the taboo? "Has there been an explicit but secret directive to all producers to steer clear of the subject? Has this policy been built up by means of nods, winks and frowns on high; or does it stem from tacit acceptance by all concerned at the prevailing orthodoxy in the wider society?" Four things are needed to reform the BBC according to Parsons' prescription. Firstly, there needs to be major change in 'media Zeitgeist' that will permit a Population Glasnost. Secondly, the BBC needs to "stop cowering beneath its cloak of political correctness" and by honest analysis foster the emergence of a mature, ecologically informed electorate. Thirdly, the BBC needs to hire population experts. "Some BBC presenters who have an overweening confidence in their qualifications start laying down the law on those population topics which are allowed a mention, and in the process frequently display their ignorance. They pick up and mindlessly repeat half-baked notions about alleged labour shortages and pension problems, and swallow hook, line and sinker any free-floating opinions about how much better things will continue to become as numbers inexorably swell." Fourthly, it would be nice if the BBC followed its own Producer Guidelines. "Due impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC. All BBC programmes and services should be open-minded, fair and show a respect for truth. No significant strand of thought should go unreflected or unrepresented at the BBC." Until then, however, its Motto will remain that of the Three allegedly Wise Monkeys: See no population problem! Hear no population problem! Speak no population problem! Mark O'Connor, poet and one-time National Vice President of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population (AESP, renamed Sustainable Population Australia - SPA), has made a similar assessment of the ABC. In his upcoming book, "Overloading Australia", O'Connor concedes that the ABC is critical to Australian democracy and is able to speak to the people---"and often does". "But the ABC has in some parts of its news and current affairs sections failed to provide objectivity or fairness to portray debates or news coverage relating to population, immigration or economics." It is living the Comfortable Lie-that growth is good and sustainable, and the mass immigration that fuels it must continue. "The fact must be faced. There is something deeply wrong in some parts of it." O'Connor asserts that "issues and news items that require at least occasional coverage have been ignored. These issues certainly have reached the initial attention of those researchers who filter stories up the chain. Thus we are forced to speak of a given ABC program 'suppressing' stories even if many or most of those in a given unit were unaware this was going on. But there certainly is bias." Even if outside observers will never be able to locate its precise source. He offers some examples of this bias. The ABC collaborated with the bipartisan support of high immigration by suppressing most of the debate and repeatedly gave airtime to propagandists who claimed that our 'shamefully low immigration quotas' were 'proof of racism'. The inconvenient fact that Australia had the highest per capita intake of immigrants in the world when these brazen assertions were made was never raised by the corporation to challenge them. And "among its many acts of censorship, ABC TV News suppressed the fact that the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Democrats had long been calling for zero net migration. Yet as soon as the One Nation party announce a zero net migration policy, the ABC cited it as "racism". O'Connor speculates as to why the ABC behaves in this manner. "The ABC's failure through nearly three decades to deal with population issues-the most important matter facing Australia today--- may have less to do with individuals than with a pervasive institutional culture." Nevertheless, "if there are such persons blocking the debate, then it is assuredly time they were persuaded to move on to other areas where their biases will do less harm." He concludes, "The ABC has a problem with its news service and current affairs programs. It may not be able to rectify past unfairness, but it needs urgently to offer guarantees that the censorship will cease, and that at least in future those who disagree with high immigration or with 'birth-bribes' will receive equal time on its programs." New 'balance and accountability' guidelines announced by management in October of 2006 "will not address ABC News' pro-growth, pro-natalist, pro-conventional economic views." Can what has so far been said of the BBC and the ABC be said of the CBC as well? In one word, yes, and more. While some regional centres have attempted to bring more balance to immigration issues, CBC Radio, the National centre in Toronto and the Vancouver centre have emphatically not. The corporation has refused to engage the public on the two questions that they keep asking: Why is the government importing more people per capita than any other country than the world and what effect is this infux, which gives us the highest growth rate of any G8 nation, having on our economic, cultural and environmental health? Timidity and cowardice are not the exclusive province of CBC journalists, but only private media outlets have on occasion exposed abuses of the immigration system and questioned the country's high immigration intake. The CBC, on the other hand, has done what it can to promote mass immigration on the basis of its misinterpretation of its 1991 legislated mandate to promote "multiculturalism". Somehow there is an equation in corporate logic of the stated "CBC Vision" to reflect "the cultural diversity of our people" with support for mass immigration. But apparently the promotion of a diversity of cultures is quite different than the promotion of a diversity of opinions. Those very many Canadians who voice negative concerns about immigration are simply denied airtime by the people they subsidize. It is indeed an impertinent supplicant who holds out one hand to ask for public funding while clenching the other in a fist to drive into the mouth of the taxpayer who dares to challenge the corporate line on immigration. And yet, the CBC allows generous airtime and interviews with pro-immigration groups, so that they may in turn, as a quid pro quo, advertise for the non-commercial CBC. So to partiality and deceit one can therefore add corruption to the list of CBC immigration vices. So what then is the remedy? Suffice it to say that the CBC's commitment to mass immigration and multiculturalism comes at the cost of balanced, honest journalism. Immigration Watch Canada demands that the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage should order the CBC executive to answer for this conflict of interest and to terminate the corporation's corrupt arrangements with the immigration industry, its blatant pro-immigration advocacy and the employment of people who engage in it. Such measures would seek not to curb journalistic freedom, but journalistic abuse. And return public broadcasting to the public. Then once again, the National Broadcaster would offer a forum where indeed "no significant strand of thought should go unreflected or unrepresented" and the exclusion of topics or the shunning of voices would be thought foreign to its corporate culture and democratic mission. It's time to end the conspiracy of silence against critiques of immigration and population growth.

This article was also published on qlddecides.com as Saving the Regent - The Sinnamon plan. My response to the choice of that title was posted to that site and is included below.

In little more than a generation, Brisbane's skyline has been transformed into a ghastly inhuman wall of office blocks and high rise residential apartments. Today, much of Brisbane resembles a war zone as established business districts and neighourhoods are further trashed as this process is continued, along with a spate of more recent white elephant infrastructure projects, all at a horrific cost to our local and global environment.

A small, but welcome, pause from this breakneck pace of over-development occurred when Labor Premier Anna Bligh on 23 February, as reported in Brisbane's Courier Mail Newspaper, responded to a public outcry against the threatened destruction of Brisbane's Regent Theatre. The 80 year old Regent Theatre was to be effectively destroyed in order to make way for an AU$800 million 38-storey commercial high-rise at the back of the Regent Theatre. However, Premier Bligh used rarely enacted legislation to stop this. The legislation allows the Queensland Government to force the private developers, Multiplex and ISPT, to keep the Regent cinema operating regardless of whether or not they wanted to.

As welcome as Premier Bligh's stance is, it is sadly out of character with her overall record. Anna Bligh and her predecessor Beattie who have embraced a 'growth at all costs' mind-set which has no regard for the preservation of Brisbane's quality of life or the well-being of future generations. Both the Queensland Labor Government and Campbell Newman's Liberal Brisbane City Council administration have ridden rough-shod over community objections to many other inappropriate infrastructure and housing developments. These include the Suncorp Stadium, the Hale Street Bridge, the North South Bypass Tunnel, the Airport Link tunnel, Brisbane Airport's second runway, the conversion of the publicly-owned Yungaba migrant hostel into a private gated community, Minnippi Parklands, the Traveston Dam, the Wyaralong Dam, etc. In 2005 the residents of Maleny endured an invasion of 150 Queensland Police so that the Woolworths supermarket, opposed overwhelmingly by local residents could be built.

However, on this occasion, instead of ignoring the wishes of the Brisbane community, the Queensland Government has supported them and even the equally pro-development opposition leader Laurence Springborg has endorsed Anna Bligh's stance.

However, another force for relentless over-development, namely Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper, owned by US citizen Rupert Murdoch, has chosen not to relax its stance and has harshly criticised the Premier in an editorial "Protection in name of popularity" of 26 February.

The Courier Mail editorialists believe that the right of the developers to profit from the further disfigurement of Brisbane's skyline is more important than the wishes of of Brisbane residents to retain what little is left of their heritage. It stated:

... but does that then give the State Government the right to dictate to a profit-driven private sector developer what sort of business it can or cannot operate on the site? Presumably, one reason for the proposed redevelopment is that a 30-year-old four-cinema complex is a less profitable use of the land than a 38-storey office tower.

From the point of view of society at large, few profits are to be had from these projects. Instead, they merely facilitate the transfer of wealth out of its pockets into the pockets of the likes of Multiplex and ISPT, whilst massive quantities of greenhouse gases are pumped into the atmosphere, particularly during their construction phases, and the earth's scarce and diminishing stocks of fossil fuel and metals are exhausted. In no more than a generation, these high rise structures will be inoperable as the necessary fossil fuels become ever more scarce and will stand just as much as monuments to to the folly of today's political and business leaders as do the pyramids built on Central America's Yucutan peninsula stand as monuments to the folly of the leaders of the failed Mayan civilisation.

The Courier Mail editorialist then argues that the taxpayers of Queensland to make up for the shortfall in profits:

Now it is quite possible that the developers might be able to rethink their proposal and decide they can make it work, with the Regent intact. However, if Ms Bligh feels so strongly about preserving the whole of the theatre complex, then perhaps she should be arguing the case for some sort of government underwriting – not something we would support – rather than simply sticking it to the private sector, as it were.

In reality, the evidence shows that it is today's taxpayers and ratepayers, as well as future generations, who subsidise the profits of developers, because they are forced to foot the bill for the infrastructure made necerssary to service such developments.

The editorialist also effectively accused Premier Anna Bligh of pandering to populism, when it asked:

But is it possible that this whole exercise is less about protecting fond memories and more about good old-fashioned, politically motivated playing to the crowd?

The Courier Mail editorialists no doubt prefer leaders who know better than 'the crowd' itself what is good for them, hence their past support for the North South Bypass Tunnel, the Hale Street Bridge, "Work Choices", the privatisation of Telstra and Queensland's Energex electricity company, high immigration, the Iraq war, the Traveston Dam, forced local government amalgamations, etc.

James Sinnamon
Independent candidate for Lord Mayor of Brisbane

Comment posted to qlddecides.com:

Thanks Jason for posting this. The original article is entitled "Saving the Regent Theatre earns Queensland Premier the wrath of the Courier Mail" and can be found at http://candobetter.org/node/342

However, the article is not actually a plan to save the Regent. That appears, thankfully, to have been done by Premier Anna Bligh. I meant to use the occasion to give due credit to a politician in whom I otherwise see very little of merit, also to comment on the anti-democratic pro-developer stance of Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper.

Whilst normally supportive of Bligh, when she does the bidding of powerful vested interests, the Courier Mail was hostile to the Premier's out-of-character decision on this occasion.

Tim Murray, director of Immigration Watch Canada, follows the money trail in the US Presidential primaries.
Note: all dollar figures given in following article are in US dollars.

Also published in Canada Free Press on 11 Mar 08.

Popular opposition to immigration ignored by U. S. legislators

The numbers are unequivocal. For a decade polls have consistently recorded a wide discrepancy between the attitude of ordinary Americans toward immigration and the attitude of those who govern them. And the gap has been growing. In 2002 a poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found that 60% of the public thought current immigration levels to be a "critical threat to the vital interests of the United States," as compared to only 14% of the country's leadership. This 46% gap compared to a 37% gap revealed by a 1998 poll. 70% felt that reducing illegal immigration should be a "very important" foreign policy goal compared to only 22% of the political elite₁.

Polling done by TM, inc. in October 2006 confirmed these results. While the U.S. Senate passed a bill (S2611) supporting a large increase in legal immigration, 68% of voters thought the number of immigrants, legal or illegal, was too high, 34 times the number who said it was too "low". 71% said that low paying jobs could easily be filled if employers paid American workers decent wages rather than import low-skill labour. And 62% agreed with a statement that Canadian viewers of CBC immigration sob stories have frequently observed, "The media coverage of illegal immigrants is mostly devoted to human interest stories like how illegals risk their lives (to get here), rather than the costs they create and the Americans, particularly low-wage American workers, who may be harmed by their being here."

The polling company Inc./Woman Trend in October of 2006 found 66% in agreement that the population increase caused by the present level of immigration would negatively impact the environment. A Zogbylcis poll of April 2006 revealed that 67% of Americans wanted less immigration to promote the assimilation of those who were already here. A poll conducted a month earlier by the same company found that 60% wanted their congressional representative to support more restrictive immigration policies.

What is interesting about sampling public opinion about immigration is that no apparent or substantial fault lines appear between ethnic groupings. Now it is understandable that African-Americans, given their socio-economic standing, feel the direct brunt of illegal Hispanic labour competition , and would therefore take a severe position on the issue. In fact, 59% of black Californian voters favour imposing stiff penalties on employers who hire illegal aliens, (Field Poll, April 2006), and 66% of them favour building a border wall along major sections of the U.S./Mexico line.

Opposition to immigration embraced by non-European communities

But it would surprise some to learn, especially those like most American liberals, who are ignorant of Caesar Chavez's long standing fight against immigration, that 76% of Hispanics said in a December 2007 poll done by Arizona State University-Southwest that illegal immigration is a serious problem. Or that 53% of Latinos would change the 14th amendment so a child born to an illegal immigrant in America could not automatically become an American unless the other parent was a citizen. Or that 56% of Latinos favour increasing the number of border patrol agents by a third. Unfortunately, as former Mexican government advisor Fredo Arras-King observed, "American Latinos who criticize mass immigration tend not to organize, as they are especially targeted by pro-immigration Latino leaders."

Causes of disparity between attitudes of US citizens and their political leadership

The question that these poll results beg is why? Why the cleavage between leaders and led? The anti-immigration sentiment of America's middle and working class is easily accounted for. According to Centre for Immigration Studies data, in the decade preceding 2003, immigration increased the supply of people without a high school education by 21% and the supply of other workers by 4%. Rudimentary economic theory suggests that the more poorly skilled workers there are, the less money they'll make---a fact confirmed by the National Research Council in their findings that about half the drop in real wages for high school drop-outs from 1980 to 1994 was due to immigration. A report by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Centre found that Americans and established immigrants suffer an 11% wage drop when they work alongside new Hispanic immigrants. Harvard Professor Dr. George Borgias has accumulated similar data and has made the shocking assertion that American workers lose an incredible $152 billion per year in wages from immigration.

Immigration provides a ready-made source of cheap labour, by growing the labour pool it weakens the bargaining power of American-born workers and reduces the clout of their unions, if they still have them₂. Medical benefits not borne by the employer are subsidized by the taxpayers who also pick up the educational costs of their children. Writer Rich Lowry made the best assessment: "No wonder corporate America loves our open borders: they serve as a kind of rolling reverse minimum wage law." And no wonder the late African-American liberal Congressman Barbara Jordan called for cutting back immigration in the 1990s. She was defending her constituency of low-income black workers, the first casualty of the corporate welfare program of high-level immigration, marketed by the left as "multicultural enrichment". Cultural diversity is the fig leaf of naked corporate exploitation.

So blue-collar attitudes to immigration are easily explained, ordinary people are simply following their class interests. And class interests can explain the open borders position taken up by America's opinion leaders and decision makers too. They are much more affluent and educated than the people they lead and attempt to influence, and feel no threat from the illegal immigrants they hire as nannies and gardeners or tip at fine restaurants. One thing is central to the understanding of the immigration divide in the United States, and that is to divest oneself of the almost universal and persistent belief that somehow the Democrats are white knights who represent the working class, the poor and the environment, while the Republicans are the incarnation of power, privilege and plutocracy. To assist you in this task you should be apprised of the following.

A TM Inc poll of 2006 disclosed that those most apt to be satisfied with the current level of immigration which is killing American working class living standards were 25-34 year old liberal college graduates and professionals who identified with the Democratic Party. The same poll found though that it was 35-44 year old conservative Republicans who favoured large-scale round-ups of illegal immigrants. That profiles the supporters of the pro and anti-immigration positions, but the current party leadership positions could best be ascertained by the fact that as of the end of January 2008, all Republican contenders rejected the legalization of "undocumented" immigrants now in the U. S., while the Democrats continue to support it.

Corporate donations flow toward pro-immigration candidates ...

The true alignment of the Democratic Party with corporate interests can be vividly illustrated by a look at campaign financing. McCain, Clinton and Obama are, to put it bluntly, Wall Street candidates. The big banks, the financial firms, corporate law firms and private equity firms pay the pipers. But, according the Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP) (www.opensecrets.org), the Democrats are the clear favourite. Hillary Clinton took in $106.1 million and Barack Obama $102.1 million for all of 2007. McCain received susbstantially less at $41,102,178. Hillary Clinton received $1.3 million from private equity firms, while Obama received $1 million. McCain finished a distant fourth at $ 395,000. Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory.

Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal tax rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Clinton and Obama have also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests. Corporate law firms gave Clinton over $11 million and Obama over $ 9 million. McCain only got just over two and a half million dollars, the most for Republican candidates. As of February 22, 2008, bagmen have raised over $138 million for Obama, over $134 million for Clinton, and over $53 million for McCain.

Most interesting is the disposition of "Silicon" money. Between 1998 and 2006 almost $83 million in political contributions in the form of individuals donations, PAC contributions, and soft money were made by 40 technology companies. Amounting on average to just $295,708 per company per year of lobbying, it was money well spent. The concession Bill Gates wanted, the H-1B Visa program that allows cheap technology workers into the country, reaped profits a hundred times that investment. But Microsoft wanted to be more certain the fix was in. Over that that seven year period they gave $5,7888,286, with half of Congress on its payroll it would seem. AT+T donated $3,504,773, Apple $3,620,823, and Vericon $4,237,884₃. Data for the 2008 campaign showed Obama at $981,459 and Clinton $954,325 as the leading recipients of "computer-internet" donations, with McCain getting a third of their take. To put all of this in perspective, Hillary Clinton, the great white hope of progressive liberalism, received only 11% of her PAC money from labour, but 56% from business. It would be difficult to imagine that the AFL-CIO could match the donation dollars put up by Wall bankers and law firms.

The most revealing fact to be gleaned from presidential campaign donation statistics is one found when donation records are subjected to sector analysis. If one studies 12 business or professional sectors of American society from Agribusiness to Construction to Health to Labour etc., there is one sector that is clearly salient---the "financial-real estate" sector. It has contributed over $73 million to various campaigns, $25 million more than any other sector.

Real estate interests (including mortgage brokers, homebuilders and property developers) gave $4.8 million to Clinton, $2.7 million to Obama and $1.9 million to McCain. The conventional interpretation of their motive is that they want access to the winner when an expected crackdown over predatory lending and a troubled housing finance system reaches the top of the legislative agenda. But there is an alternative, or at least supplementary explanation. One that has been advanced by Australian population sociologist Sheila Newman. The land tenure system that characterizes Anglo-American societies encourages speculation, and much money is to be made simply by population growth. Newman has written extensively to demonstrate that real estate developers are key players in lobbying for mass immigration. US campaign donation records seem to vindicate her hypothesis, as does the fact that a nation like France is close to achieving population stability because the real estate development industry cannot exist as an agent for growth, given that land cannot consistently be reduced to a speculative commodity largely because of the way tenure is arranged₄.

... whilst anti-immigration contenders miss out

What then became of the candidates who challenged the corporate open borders agenda? Their campaigns died from lack of funds. Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado is a case in point. Wall Street likes pro-immigration candidates for obvious reasons and so they will reward those who sing their tune. Tancredo insisted on singing an objectionable note, like a three year moratorium on immigration. So he paid the price and collected just $6 million dollars or less than 6% of what Clinton received by year's end and was forced to end his campaign. Clinton at that time was Wall Street's anointed one, someone who, in the words of Numbers USA, "consistently pressed for U. S. population growth, immigration and foreign labour importation." But of course such an agenda of unabashed greed needs always to be camoflauged with a politician's candy floss, the spin is what they are purchased for. So Clinton obliged her corporate donors by saying that "we should always be open to legal immigration-it reforms, it makes us better." Well, it certainly makes a few of us richer Hillary, doesn't it, like your donors and supporters, the most well-heeled of either party!

Corporate America gets what it has paid for from open-border legislators

An examination of Clinton's voting record should confirm that big business is getting what it paid for. Clinton was co-sponsor of Bill S-2109 to help employees import cheap high tech workers while the big law firms who give to her campaign are counseling them how to use the legal system to avoid hiring qualified U.S. workers. Her support of Senate bill 2109 helped expedite the processing of the infamous H-1B visas that depress wages and displace workers. She supported an amnesty of illegal agricultural workers (S bill 1340) and another one of a similar nature (S. bill 2137) that would have brought an amnesty to another 860,000 workers not counting family. Clinton's support of Kennedy's bill S 2381 would have meant amnesty to almost all illegal aliens. Her numerous attempts to sponsor "shamnesty" bills is reflective of a comment she made to a man who said that his wife was an illegal immigrant. "No woman is illegal", Clinton replied.

If Hillary's record is atrocious, it is doubtful if Obama's is any better. His positions seem almost indistinguishable from Clinton's, the difference being more one of emphasis than policy. He supports employer verification of employee identity to deter the hiring of illegals, she doesn't. She favours lower legal immigration intakes, he doesn't. Obama's main focus is the human rights and economic needs---of those knocking at America's door wanting to come in and those already in, legally or illegally. On the Senate floor he stated on May 23, 2007 that "Where we can re-unite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with skills our economy needs, we should." This was an ominous declaration. Since the law was changed in 1965 to create the so-called family re-unification system, "chain migration"---where an immigrant sponsors several others who in turn sponsors several more---has caused the numbers under this category to spiral out of control. In 36 years the number of immediate relatives admitted was over 13 times higher than it was when the law was first enacted to almost one-half million per year.

An Obama policy statement maintains support for "improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world's most talented people to America." But H-1B visa holders are not paid as much as Americans, and even Microsoft admits that salaries have not kept pace with inflation. That would do much to explain a so-called labour shortage in the field. As for Obama's goal of attracting the best and the brightest, the vast majority of H-1B holders make in the $60,000 range (Intel's median salary is $65,000), but top talents in the industry capture more than $100,000. And ironically the great majority of awards for innovation have fallen to Americans, indicating that the industry is not shackled by a domestic cognitive deficit that needs relief by a massive injection of foreign Einsteins. The quest for the best and brightest of overseas talent is a smokescreen for the tech corporations' prime motive, the hunt not for the brightest minds but those that come at the cheapest price. And the H-1B program doesn't even require employers to give hiring priority to qualified American citizens, and they have an arsenal of legal measures to reject those who apply. If one is given to wonder why a U.S. Congress would expand the H-1B program in 2000 when their employers, the American taxpayers, most of whom are workers, were not its obvious beneficiaries, Utah Senator Bob Bennett's comment would be informational: "There were, in fact, a whole lot (of Congressmen) against it, but because they are tapping the high-tech community for campaign contributions, they don't want to admit that in public."

John McCain, the only Republican contender left standing, were it not for his title as waterboy for Iraq, could run for the Democrats. He got the ball rolling in 1986 when he signed the 1986 amnesty for illegals and thereby gave the green light for aspiring border-crossers who knew that American law could be violated with impunity and trespass retroactively forgiven. He ran his nomination race on a full-throttle amnesty platform until he found religion earlier this year and back-pedaled. He has voted for S-1639 to double legal immigration, to continue chain migration and the ridiculous annual jackpot lottery of 50,000 applicants from third world nations called "Diversity Immigration". McCain's problem is that he is a dark horse and Wall Street, while hedging its bets, likes to back winners. So his take of their money is but one-third of Obama's and Clinton's.

Ron Paul is a footnote, like Tancredo. His $32 million was not enough and he is the only one who doesn't know its all over, apparently. Paul's anti-immigration stance has not been as comprehensive or as strident as Tancredo's, but firm nonetheless, as reflected in his statement that a nation without secure borders is no nation at all. But Paul is a walking/talking contradiction. While he favours the the usual gamut of measures to protect American workers from the competition of the illegal invasion---border security, employee verification, no amnesty, no welfare for illegals, no alien birthright citizenship etc.---he is also a libertarian in the Friedman tradition. Leaving the working class alone to fend for itself against an unregulated free market is like trusting a ravenous beast to mind your children. With closed borders and free markets Ron Paul offers American workers a goblet of hemlock mixed with green tea for good health. Paul thus falls between two stools. He's no good for Wall Street and he's no good for Main Street either. A curious fellow.

Failure of immigration opponents to address its causes

The most disappointing feature of the American immigration dialogue is its one-dimensional nature. Two critical elements are virtually absent from the arguments presented by both open and closed borders advocates. One is that both sides talk about what attracts Mexican labour to America, and therefore the measures for turning them away. But no one talks about the conditions in Mexico that drove people to take desperate risks to get to the United States and who is responsible for those conditions. When is America going to look in the mirror and admit that the larcenous NAFTA agreement and rapacious rampage of multinational corporations undercut a viable Mexican economy and the basis for a decent life for so many Mexicans? When are American politicians and opinion-makers going to acknowledge that much of American prosperity is built on the backs of those people and others like them in the hemisphere and the world? All the measures proposed by the anti-immigrationist forces are necessary, but by no means sufficient to defend the borders. America cannot play King Canute and hold back a tide of billions. It must reduce the tide by ensuring that the billions do not want to leave home. Scrap the trade agreements, the IMF, SAPs (Structural Adjustment Policies) and offer restitution to rebuild economies that have been pillaged₅.

Carrying capacity of U. S. overlooked in debate

Aside from NAFTA, there is another crucial phrase missing from US immigration discussions. Carrying capacity. Each year the United States adds the equivalent of another Chicago. During the Bush administration it has grown by 21 million people. Immigrants, their children and grandchildren will account for 82% of all population growth in the years leading up to 2050, when the country will reach a staggering 438 million if this growth rate is not slowed. Some worry about assimilation, since the share of non-Hispanic whites will fall from 67 to 47%. Obviously the labour market is the focus of most, who would share Samuel Gompers's conviction that "immigration is fundamentally a labour issue." But full employment and economic prosperity in a culturally or linguistically cohesive America would be a pyrrhic accomplishment if such a nation were to rest on a collapsing ecosystem. Can America sustain half its current population when critical resource shortages appear or biodiversity services are compromised ? The works of analysts like David Pimental, Dale Pfeiffer and Richard Heinberg do not inform any Congressional debate about how many people the country should admit. Clearly a Population Plan is overdue.

The American people have spoken on immigration but the political elite will not listen because they are paid by their corporate benefactors not to listen. It is sad to see the world's greatest democratic experiment come to such grief. The Founding Fathers devised a system that they embedded in a constitution with mechanisms to counter-act the natural instinct of the political class to usurp power and exercise it as a permanent elite dominating pauperized subjects on the old European model. They counted on a "vigilant and manly spirit" that animates the American people to breath life and vigour into the constitution. But alas, the Founding Fathers couldn't possibly foresee the power and the scale of Wall Street money.

In America today, anything's for sale, even democracy. I hear a Senator earmarked for the White House can be had, for, oh around 134-138 million. Sound right?

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
February 23/08

Footnotes

1. See www.worldviews.org/detailreports/usreport/html/ch535.html, www.cis.org/articles/2002/back1402.html.

2. See Tim Murray's article "Is it reactionary to oppose Immigration?" of 16 Dec 2007 at webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/2240, candobetter.org/node/284l.

3. See chart of political contributions from hi-tech companies at www.news.com/2009-1028-6050978.html.

4. Refer to Sheila Newman's 2002 Master's year thesis "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France (PDF - 2.6MB) downloadable from candobetter.org/sheila.

5. Refer, also to Tim Murray's article "Closing our borders can't mean turning our backs" of 25 October 2007 at candobetter.org/node/228.

Poet and author Mark O’Connor has written another important analysis of Australia’s ecological eclipse at the hands of the growth cult. While the continent is obviously unique in its botanical character with problems that don’t challenge Canadians, the similarities with Canada that O’Connor reveals in his description of the evolution of the growth ethic are simply astounding.

Like Canada, “Australia was, and still is, even though much trashed and abused, a treasure house of biodiversity,” toward which the people have a somewhat schizophrenic attitude. On the one hand, “Australians are genuinely proud of their wildlife…many people assign a very high, almost religious value to conserving nature”, as evidenced by their tolerance of crocodiles which make it impossible to swim in their waters. 10.7% of Australia is incorporated in a strategic network of parks.

Yet, O’Connor writes, “Attitudes to Australia’s biodiversity remain mixed.” It may be inspirational to watch them in flight but “people don’t appreciate kangaroos eating their crops.” Sadly Australian experience shows that democracy is not good at preserving other species---they don’t vote.  "(There is) a theme that runs through Australia’s ecological history: the clash between the desire to protect biodiversity versus the need of an ever-growing human population to make a quid from it.”

O’Connor reminds readers that Australia’s ecology was dynamic. While “we might prefer to praise the Aborigines’ achievement in living sustainably with the land for millennia, and contrast this with the damage eight generations of  European lifestyle have wrought,” Aboriginal hunters had already modified ecology by the fire regime they imposed before Europeans arrived. Paul Watson, it should be pointed out here, asserts that Aborigines killed off 85% of the continent’s megafauna before the British hit Botany Bay, an assertion that has been contested. Nevertherless, Watson is one of the very few Canadians not given to romantic illusions about indigenous stewardship of precious resources.

The foundation of Australia’s current ecological crisis, and that of Canada, is their false self-perception as vast empty lands desperately in need of more people: two bloated bulimics who look in the mirror and see themselves as Twiggy with lots of room to grow. The myth is best captured by Australia’s national anthem “Advance Australia Fair” when it says “For those who’ve come across the seas. We’ve boundless plains to share.”

But as O’Connor notes, Australia has only 6% of its land mass proven
as arable. For Canada it is 7% with soils marginal by European standards. As for wheat, because Australia provides 20% of the world’s wheat imports, feeding 40 million people, “boomers” argue that Australia could feed a far higher resident population than its current 21 million. But they forget that much of that foreign exchange is needed to pay for the fuel and nitrate fertilizer used for production, and soil loss, acidification and climate change will diminish yields. “Every tonne of wheat still costs some tones of eroded soil”, O’Connor observes.

Even so, with the drought tolerant wheat grown in fertile soils in a good year Australia produces less wheat than France, and in a bad year sometimes less than Britain. And all at the cost of ‘fascinating’ bio-regions cleared and species eliminated.

So if the big empty land in fact suffers from a limited carrying capacity, if food self-sufficiency is a myth, if biodiversity is taking a beating, why then does Australia seem in a frenzy to add to its numbers? (Canada could be asked the same question). Who drives growth? Qui Bono? Who Benefits?

The answer might be found in research done by the Australian Green Party that revealed that the governing Labor Party of New South Wales received $8.78 million in 1998-99 from property developers, while the opposition Coalition Parties received $6.35 million. Not surprisingly then, Sydney’s councils have been instructed to accommodate an extra 1.1 million people (24%) in 25 years so that Australia offers the paradox of a huge country with urban housing prices comparable to New York or London, where land prices double in a decade and its 1.5% population growth is higher than Indonesia’s and indeed many Third World countries.

“Local and even national newspapers run a depressing spiral of puff pieces about how we are desperately short of skilled and willing workers---alternately with pieces about how we are desperately short of projects to provide employment. The intended solution is of course an endless cycle (or spiral) of increasing population and increasing construction. If only politicians could give Australia the construction industry its population needs, rather than the population its construction industry would like.”

O’Connor cites Australia’s Anglo-Celtic property system for fuelling the drive to “fill the country with people” by rewarding private speculation in land. “By contrast, the nation’s capital, Canberra, was built on a French-style system, with the government resuming land from farmers at fair but moderate prices, auctioning it as cheaply as possible, and using the profit it couldn’t help making to provide roads, schools, services and an elegantly planned layout. Canberra remains one of the world’s most livable cities, and (for the developers who control much of Australia’s politics) an embarrassing proof that there is a better way.”

To footnote this observation, it should be noted that Australian population sociologist Sheila Newman has ably documented the relationship between the British property system and the population growth lobby on the one hand, and the French property system and the absence of anymeaningful lobby for growth in France on the other hand. Students of Canadian civic politics know that developers virtually own city councils. What sinister role do they play behind the scenes in framing federal immigration policy or influencing it? The Urban Futures Institute, a high profile Vancouver-based think tank, is a consistent cheerleader for massive immigration. Its former mouthpiece was “demographer” David Baxter who couched his arguments in demographic statistics to prove that he was in possession of a crystal ball. In fact, he had no credentials as a demographer. He was merely a front man for the real estate industry which fully funds the institute. He was guaranteed an interview by every media outlet when occasion demanded it.

Has any voice of caution or restraint been raised against this mad rush to ecological oblivion? Well there was the Whitlam Labor government of 1972-75 which reacted to the first Global Oil shock by limiting immigration and population growth. Then the Australian Academy of Science made a major public statement in 1994 that advised that Australia’s population not exceed 23 million and that immigration be half of what it was during the Hawke-Keating era. The Science Council of Canada issued a similar report in 1975 when it warned that Canada’s population should not go beyond 30 million. The government responded by abolishing the Science Council and then proceeding along a path that saw the land of frozen tundra, lakes and mountains fill up one-fifth of its Class 1 farmland with subdivisions and become a nation of 33 million with the fastest growth rate in the G8 group.

The Australian Democrats came out in favour of zero-net-migration, but the political culture was poisoned. Under the Hawke-Keating Labor governments of 1983-1996, Australia was essentially a “plutocratic democracy” where voters were presented with a Hobson’s choice between parties who were “servants of business-growth lobbies”. While cognizant of conservationist sensibilities, “Hawke dared not offend the growth lobby.” But even the large immigrant communities were among the 73% of voters who in 1991 said immigration levels were too high, or the 71% in 1996 who held to this opinion. Again, Canadians have affected consistent opposition to immigration in the same proportions, but like Australians, have been presented with a solid parliamentary front in favour of a policy they detest.

But nevertheless, given the scale and persistence of this discontent, Labor’s spin-doctors needed to give the old myth of Australia, as an empty land, a make-over. There was no farmland available and urban land prices were beyond reach, so alright then, it would no longer be Australia’s manifest destiny to build a “great” nation but rather a “diverse” one. It would become a United Nations of ethnicities and races, sustained by permanent immigration, long after the pioneering period had passed. But the obsession with cultural diversity would trump concern for preserving biological diversity.

“Thus instead of being ashamed that we have lost so many of our marsupial species, many Australians on the left seem more ashamed that we do not have a flourishing Inuit or Bantu community in their particular city. Quite why it should be Australia’s duty to turn itself into a representative sample of the cultures of the earth is never explained. Instead, there are constant shouts that any reduction of immigration will lead us tumbling back into an abyss of ‘racism’ and ‘boring monoculturalsim’.”

“Hawke’s and Keating’s spin doctors even took advantage of the Anglo-Celtic guilt over having immigrated upon the Aboriginal tribes without their permission and violently displaced them. Somehow this became a further reason why high immigration, so long as it was no longer Anglo-Celtic, was essential­--as if inviting in the rest of the world would legitimize it.”

O’Connor forecasts that the incoming Labor government of Kevin Rudd will continue the traditional quest for economic growth, only addressing GHG issues if they do not compromise this goal. He compares Australia to “a cruise liner whose captain is required to sail in the direction chosen by a deck-steward whose priority is to keep the sun shining on the deckchairs in the saloon section, so that their occupants will order more drinks.”

The metaphor is an interesting one, for Canada too could be compared to a cruise liner: The HMS Ecological Titanic still robotically stopping to pick up more passengers as it ploughs forward toward the iceberg of over-population.

We may, albeit in diminished numbers, adapt to climate change, but we will not adapt to biodiversity collapse. O’Connor spoke of Australia’s botanical and ecological fragility, but this is what environmentalist Brishen Hoff said of Canada: “Our boreal forest continues to experience wholesale clearcutting and relentless road expansion. More water is being diverted from the Great Lakes watershed than what is being replenished, causing the highest lakes (Nipigon, Superior, etc.) to dramatically drop their water levels. I could go on with thousands of examples of species extinctions and worsening environmental quality right here in Ontario and Algoma-Manitoulin all because of human population growth.”

In fact most of the more than 500 threatened species dwell within the range of Canada’s major urban centres where they are imperiled by sprawling subdivisions, roughly 70% of which are occupied by immigrants. But remember, mass immigration is to be celebrated in Canada as, in the words of Green Party leader Elizabeth May, “our great multicultural project.” Like Sydney, Vancouverites are told that they must move over and accommodate another 800,000 migrants in the coming 23 years (24% growth) and appreciate the newcomers for the “diversity” they bring. But at what cost this “cultural diversity”? An infinitely richer, more vital heritage. The biological diversity of the species that this growth will extinguish.

What’s the answer? O’Connor quotes Gordon Hocking of NSW: “As long as we stick with an economic system that needs to perpetually grow we will remain trapped on the road to ecological and climate disaster.” Brishen Hoff would add “None of these symptoms can be reversed without shrinking the size of our economy and then moving to a steady state economy.”

Bulimics gorge, then purge. Let’s hope our national binging ends soon and our demographic weight loss is progressive and incremental rather than dramatic and deadly.

Watch for Mark O’Connor’s upcoming book, “Overloading Australia”.

Tim Murray
Director of Immigration Watch Canada
8 January 2008

The deadline is fast approaching. Send in your submissions now. The first annual contest to establish who indeed is the most idiotic of the world's Green Parties is upon us. Many candidates were surveyed. The Swedes, the nutty Germans and Brits, the hypocritical Canadians and Australians and even the Green Party of the United States along with some of its discordant constituent parts. The competition for lunacy is fierce. Here are but a few of the contestants. First, let me present as my personal favourites, Canada's Greens. Their leader, Elizabeth May, argues that we should reduce our individual ecological footprint but at the same time import 300,000 more "footprints" each year just to strengthen our "cultural diversity". This "Great Multicultural Project" as she calls it, of course takes precedence over any project to protect biological diversity or constrain GHG emissions, which her 300,000 incoming footprints will increase. The Canadian Greens are a masterpiece of contradictions and confusion. Ontario leader Frank de Jong told us privately that Canada is overpopulated by factor of "four to ten". Yet he told others, including an Australia audience, that "population is a red herring". Now recently, on January 30th of 2008, he made the incredible assertion that "a higher population means a higher quality of life." Economic growth is no problem either. The size of the economy can increase ten fold, he maintains, only "through-put" matters. The party stands for Green taxes. Down with those antiquated fair and progressive income and capital gains taxes. But some officials like Frank Walton are waking up to the fact that low income Canadians aren't buying it. He now favours a hybrid mix of progressive and green taxes so that the poor don't pay the shot for punishing polluters and shifting to renewable technologies. That's the Canadians. Let's take a quick peek at other Green hypocrites. The British Green Party, at first blush, offers a radical departure in consciousness from its Canadian counterparts with this promise: "To promote debate on sustainable population levels for the UK, to include consideration of consumption and material comfort." (P-120) But then they say that "Richer regions and communities do not have the right to use migration controls to protect their privileges from others in the long term." Note that P-120 calls only for a debate, as the population skyrockets, because "the aim is to increase awareness of the issues-not to set specific population targets." In policy MG 101 the UK Greens acknowledge an impending human tsunami by saying that "there is likely to be mass migration of people escaping from the consequences of global warming, environmental degradation, resource shortage and population increase." So how do they propose to respond to this, besides of course to work for a fairer world that would lessen the urge to migrate? "We will progressively reduce UK immigration controls." They will do that in a multitude of ways. MG 402: " Families will not be divided by deportation." MG 403 "We will abolish the 'primary purpose' rule under which partners are refused entry if it is thought that the primary purpose of the relationship is for them to gain entry to the UK." MG 405 "Migrants illegally in the UK for over 5 years will be allowed to remain unless they pose a serious danger to public safety." MG 420 "We will resist all attempts to introduce a barrier around Europe shutting out non-Europeans or giving them more restricted rights of movement within Europe than European nationals." And in MG 454 the British Green Party has this to say about human trafficking: "The Government should grant a temporary right to stay in the country to anyone who has been trafficked or appears to have been trafficked. It should also recognize the right of those who have been trafficked to apply for a longer term or permanent immigrant status." With shameless invective, it labels as "racists of the far right" all those persons in the United Kingdom and Europe who favour increased immigration controls. The population of the United Kingdom, an island nation of 60 million acres, is currently 61 million and rising rapidly. It is obvious that under a Green Party administration, it would soon be 71 or 81 million barring an international resource or environmental crisis, in which event it would be even higher. What consumption levels would Britons have to tumble down to then to achieve sustainability? But let us save the best to last. After spending much time talking about the need for family planning, (P123, P124, P125, P126, P128), they declare in P106 that "The Green Party holds that the number of children people have should be a matter of free choice." That is brilliant. You need a licence to catch a certain number of fish and a drivers licence to operate a car within a certain speed limit but you can go ahead and have five kids on the dole and have them dump 100 metric tonnes of GHG into atmosphere because its your free choice. Yet polluters would no doubt face tough restrictions under a Green regime. The Irish Greens similarly project an image not of an environmental party but a party obsessed with human rights. Not once in their dense 13 page document on Immigration Policy do they mention carrying capacity or the ecological impact of all the asylum-seekers and immigrants that they want Ireland to embrace. They state that "The Green Party opposes any common asylum policy for the Union which results in more restrictions on asylum-seeking or in reducing rights for refugees (and) we strongly condemn the trend whereby the European Union is becoming a fortress on whose borders there are people dying in the hands of traffickers." The Greens denounced the Immigration Bill of 2004 as "flawed on account of the negative tone of the language used in it and the basic lack of provisions for family re-unification for non-nationals." And for the party effective integration of immigrants and their families is best promoted by granting them citizenship. But why does Ireland need immigrants? Economic orthodoxy provides the standard answer. In the words of an Irish Green Party policy statement: "The Central Statistics Office, in their report for 2006-36, suggests the State will continue to rely on strong inward migration to maintain economic growth. It forecasts that the economy will need 45,000 immigrant workers every year for the next 12 years to sustain economic growth." And then the Irish Greens pull out the old Chestnut that since those over 65 will in 2036 "comprise one fifth of the population rather than one tenth", it is important that " a progressive (sic) immigration policy will be in this country to ensure that the economy will be able to fund the necessary pension schemes, health and educational facilities into the future." The Irish Green Party, then, fully buys into the gospel of economic growth and the myth of immigration as a cure for an ageing population. Without debating the profound vacuity of their ideology, it is best simply to refer them to authors Richard Douthwaite, Herman Daly and Phil Mullan. Case closed. In declaring that "as a rapidly developing economy, Ireland needs migrant workers to provide essential skills and services", the Greens concede the game before it begins. They accept the necessity of a "rapidly developing economy", not thinking that on going economic growth will create labour shortages that once filled, will generate the growth that demands more immigrant labour. And this mad spiral will degrade the quality of life and despoil the environment---which is what a Green Party is supposed to be about, isn't it? That is, when it isn't defending gay rights, migrant mothers rights, handicapped rights, Ethiopian rights----identity politics. The Irish are also concerned that immigrants "are not simply labeled as economic entities, while denying them social and cultural rights." The Irish public must be brainwashed into accepting the important role immigration in Irish society, "on the changing nature of Irish national identity", and on a universal Green theme, "the value of cultural diversity". Borrowing from the Canadian handbook on social engineering, they advocate "culture sensitivity for public sector workers." The concept that maybe immigrants should learn to be sensitive to the customs of the host country is a theme universally absent from Green thinking. One could find it ironic that all across Canada, particularly Atlantic Canada, there are clubs and associations dedicated to keeping Celtic culture alive. And yet, in the heart of Celtic culture, you have an Irish government that has quickly allowed one in seven of its residents to be from another country and at least one political party, the Greens, promoting the fragmentation of that culture by its support of multiculturalism and economic growth, which drew immigrants in the first place. One wonders why the Irish spent centuries spilling blood to get the British out only to invite the East Europeans in. So much for Sinn Fein, "Ourselves Alone". Raised on Irish Nationalist folklore, you can't fathom my sense of betrayal. The Swedish and German Greens duplicate the same trademark idiocies of their sister parties. Though one must admit that the German Greens in the former coalition voting to shut down their nuclear program so that they can turn around and buy natural gas from Mr. Putin displayed an astonishing ignorance about the relative risks of nuclear and NG relative to their impact on global warming. Once again, a steady state economic model was not considered as an alternative to natural gas consumption. A look across the globe yields no surprises. The Australian Greens, for example, believe that "our environmental impact is not determined by population numbers alone, but by the way that people live." Notice that they did not say, "our environmental impact is not determined simply by the way people live, but by population numbers." The Aussies are to be congratulated for being able to utter the word "population", but like global comrades, it would kill them to put the stress on it. Over-consumption is the name of the game. And in constructing a population policy, should not "ecological sustainability" be the governing factor, unmitigated by a series of other points like "multiculturalism" (shades of Elizabeth May) and "humanitarian migration" which the Greens say Australia has an obligation to accept, including climate change refugees?" If so, then, how many? 10 million? 20? 30? Your country is a lifeboat and metaphorically speaking it has a carrying capacity of 20 people. Period. Whether you think you have an moral obligation to haul another 20 refugees on board because they are righteous, their cause is just, or they would afford your lifeboat more diversity is immaterial to the laws of physics, which state that your craft will sink under that weight. The trouble with the Australian Green Party is, like the others, it cannot decide if it is an environmentalist party or a human rights party. Its policy statement on population and immigration should be shortened by 13 points to read concisely "Australia's population policy should be determined by its commitment to ecological sustainability." The environment before people. The boat before its passengers. The Green Party of the United States places the same priority on human rights as other Green parties. A Californian Green Party policy direction document states bluntly, "immigration policies should be based strongly on human rights." Not on carrying capacity or sustainability or peak oil or climate change or biodiversity collapse but human rights. The rights of wildlife in the United States to survive runaway immigrant-driven population growth for this anthropocentric "Green" Party is given no mention. Instead, in a press release of May 23,2007 they called on Congress to enact immigration legislation that will protect human rights and "facilitate the path to citizenship" of the 25-35 million undocumented immigrants in the country, who must of course be given amnesty, the universal theme song of the Green movement. The Greens of New Mexico harmonize with that position in their immigration policy document: "We must continue to respect the potential contributions and rights of other new immigrants." The California Green Party goes further. They argue for "an authentic free-trade zone where people are free to travel for work," and invoke Cesar Chavez , as many soft greens and liberals do, as an advocate of this position. In fact Chavez was strident advocate of immigration restriction in defence of the working conditions of Mexican-Americans and stood on the border to patrol to guard against illegal entrants. The foundation of the party's attitude on immigration is found in a statement that could have been lifted from the policy book of virtually any Green party in the world: "Those living in the industrialized world must end the habits of waste and over-consumption that place as much as stress on the environment as does population growth in developing nations." Consumption, consumption, consumption. Bring on the immigrant millions. After all, "we are all the same people, and need to break down those psychological barriers, not re-enforce them." We are the same, yes, but we are also "diverse" at the same time and this diversity must be celebrated and amplified like it or not. The host culture is of little account in Greendom. The best way to celebrate diversity of course is to offer tantamount support to an 80% immigrant-driven population growth rate in California of 2% , nearly twice the national rate of 1.1%. If unchecked the state's population will double to 64 million by 2035 and another 32% of its 100 million acres will have to be devoted to urbanization and highways. If the population continues to grow, per capita agricultural land will be reduced approximately half of what it is today, and in 33 years about half of California's cropland will be unavailable. Currently the state must build 250,000 housing units yearly and one school per day just to keep pace with growth and is already 40% more densely populated than Europe. This is the state which, under the leadership of Governor Arnold Schwartzeneger, Canadians believe is so environmentally progressive because of his initiatives to reduce GHG. There is not one jurisdiction in the world that has accomplished that in the context of rapid, unchecked population growth. In the face of these facts all the California Green Party can do is issue a statement referring to those who favour greater restrictions on immigration as being "xenophobic" and "reactionary". (Let us hope they choke on that statement when they are paying 50% of their income on food in 2035). In response, an activist for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) replied, "We're not concerned about who is coming here, but simply the number. It is not a matter of condemning those people who have come here, but looking at resources and asking how many people this land can support with what kind of lifestyle." It appears that CAPS is the authentic "Green Party" in California. And we don't even have to worry about developing countries either. The tonic for overpopulation is, you guessed it, "economic growth". They conscript the old, discredited Theory of Demographic Transition to say that "Current global demographics demonstrate that economic well-being promotes low birthrates. (No, but it does promote GHG emissions and habitat loss). Its amazing that this 72 year old theory still enjoys currency. So there are the nominees for idiocy. The Canadians, the British, the Irish, the Australians and the Americans. The list is by no means inclusive. You might provide better examples of idiotic parties with outrageously contradictory policies. But let's examine the Green parties that were disqualified from the contest on the grounds of sanity. The Green Party of Missouri states that "Because human impact is now beyond a sustainable level, we must take immediate action to reduce population growth. Our goal is zero population growth in our country as soon as possible." The Green Party of Minnesota: "We support efforts toward zero or negative human population growth. Overpopulation combined with the resource demands and waste production of modern lifestyles are root causes of environmental degradation." The Green Party of Hawaii says flatly "Population growth must cease. We need carrying capacity studies for all counties to determine development limits." Hawaii suffered 2.4% annual population growth from 1970-1986 overwhelmingly due to immigration. It is no wonder that the state elected the first legislator on record to openly declare support for a steady state economy, Senator David Hemmings. Now the best is left to last. The model of a what Green Party can and should be. The Green Party of New Zealand. Their six page Population Policy statement takes the sensible approach. It begins with an estimate of what population level New Zealand can sustain, based on the Ministry of Environment's footprint analysis. In 1998 that figure was 5.7 million, but the Green Party treats it with caution, "an indicative upper limit figure only", for it recognizes that unforeseen contingencies like the peak oil crisis, climate change refugees, war, the sudden return of 750,000 expatriate New Zealanders for example, should make government provide for "spare capacity". And "in order to maintain both spare capacity and a decent standard of living, the optimum population figure will be significantly lower than the maximum carrying capacity of the land." So while Greens the world over feel compelled to fill up the tank right away and keep it full, New Zealand Greens evidence a prudence and understanding of future calamity and existing overshoot. Points 2 and 3 of their "Key Principles" state that "A self-sustaining population cannot be increased beyond the carrying capacity of useable land available" and "The population cannot be increased beyond its capacity to offset its greenhouse emissions." Alas, the Greens of New Zealand, Missouri, Minnesota and Hawaii are the renegades of the movement, the exception to the rule. In most cases, your local "Green" Party is a misnomer. It is a name designed to attract the environmentalist constituency but its focus is not really on the environment, but on human rights. The rights of migrants take precedence over their environmental impact, which Greens won't even acknowledge. On the basis of this global tour of Green parties, a provisional international manifesto of generic Green-ness is hereby offered as a guide to their cosmology: International manifesto of Genereic Green-ness

1. 1. Consumption is almost everything. Population is almost nothing.
2. Overpopulation is a global problem, so lets not try to stabilize our own.
3. Renewable technologies and greener lifestyles will save the day
.
4. We are committed to sustainability---and growth---at the same time.
5. Growth can be rendered ecologically benign if channeled, managed or deflected.
6. We share the consensus for the need for economic growth, therefore we favour liberal immigration.
There is always a chronic labour shortage isn't there and oh, don't undocumented migrants make such a contribution to our society?
7. Since we favour liberal immigration that is non-discriminatory, then we favour an aggressive multicultural strategy for the integration of migrants. We reject the concept of a national culture.
8. We place far greater emphasis on climate change than biodiversity collapse even though more species will be lost sooner to human overpopulation than to global warming, which is not as imminent or as catastrophic as the loss of biodiversity services.
9. We will only acknowledge overpopulation as a problem in developing countries. Migration of people to high consumption societies is to be countered only be lowering the per capita consumption rates of those societies.
10. Closed borders, immigration controls, or as we call the Bush fence, the "Wall of Shame" send out unfriendly signals to emigrant-countries whose cooperation we need to solve global environmental problems like AGW.
11. Relieve the wealthy of progressive income tax and capital gains tax and introduce Green Taxes. Punish those at the bottom of the income scale for not having the money to buy hybrid cars and retro-fitted houses.

The original title of this article was "Monbiot's flawed linear thinking could lead many astray"

Monbiot's statement below reveals a dangerous use of arithmetic and linear thinking.

In other words, if we accept the UN's projection, the global population will grow by roughly 50% and then stop. This means it will become 50% harder to stop runaway climate change, 50% harder to feed the world, 50% harder to prevent the overuse of resources.

It is certainly tempting to throw these concepts around because we all have a tendency to think linearly (the exception being that perhaps most people now at least realize that human population growth is exponential). Unfortunately, nature rarely works in such linear ways and there are thousands of examples of non-linear responses, threshold effects, and synergistic processes that undermine simple 1:1 relationships. So, increasing population by 50% will not necessarily result in a 50% more effort required to combat climate change (or whatever). It may mean that it takes 4 times the effort or who knows, that we cross a threshold where no amount of effort will result in a desired response.

Similarly, the recent use of the simple model that total consumption ("economy") is the product of population and the per capita consumption assumes that the two variables (per capita consumption and number of people) are independent and work in isolation. What we need to do is qualify this relationship by the phrase "all things being equal". So, for example, if population doubles and per capita consumption is cut in half, then total consumption remains unchanged all things being equal. Of course, all things are rarely equal and non-linear effects kick in, expected or unexpected. I doubt whether this relationship will ever really hold in this simple fashion.

This relationship also assumes steady state operating conditions and ignores indivisible baseline per capita consumption such as per capita use of oxygen, water etc. and upfront resource use needed to reduce human per capita consumption.

For example, in a de Jong world, (Frank de Jong is Ontario Green Party leader) we might imagine a projection of population of Ontario to double and might then go about (yeah right!) aiming at reducing per capita consumption to 50% of current levels in order to achieve no net increase in total consumption. However, doubling the population will entail upfront or continuing natural capital to achieve that lower consumption level and to simply meet baseline requirements of a larger population, regardless of its ultimate consumption level. Such up-front or one time capital is never included as an additive factor in the simple arithmetic relationship. Similarly, I am remined of China where the mean family size was reduced but the number of dwellings increased non-linearly with population due to the (unexpected?) desire of new generation Chinese to live without in-laws. You can all think of much better examples than mine but the bottom line is that we need to impress on people that nature is typically non linear and that we should qualify our simple arithmetic models with statements such as all things being equal and under steady state conditions. The more we use this kind of language the more we will be able to raise awareness of the myriad of caveats that are inherent in our (suboptimal) arithmetic.

Can you imagine for example the effect of a Green Party official saying something like:

If we double the population of Ontario and reduce per capita consumption by 50%, then, all things being equal and barring any non-linear responses by nature acting on our increased population, any unforseen threshold effects related to nature's goods and services (including abiotic and biotic), then under steady state conditions that ignore any first time start up consumption of resources, our total consumption will remain unchanged.

Keith Hobson is a biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and a member of our pan Canadian Malthusian discussion group sinkinglifeboat|AT|topica com

Posted by Tim Murray sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com