[Vision2020] Braceros! & Better Books (was: Long Live...)

[Kenneth Marcy]

On Friday 04 January 2008 10:18, Ralph Nielsen wrote:
> Thank you, Nick, for your good article about illegal Mexican workers  
> in the United States. Many of them come north because they cannot  
> compete with American corn and wheat farmers, whose products now  
> enter Mexico duty free, thanks to the North American Free Trade  
> Agreement. Now individual Mexican farmers, who practice private  
> enterprise, are being put out of business by large American corporate  
> farms which are subsidized by socialistic handouts from the American  
> taxpayers. Talk about unfair competition!

Bringing together two threads, those interested in reading about the 
macroeconomic effects of written tax and unwritten corporate policies on 
braceros and the majority of U.S. citizens, 27 December 2007 was the 
publication date of David Cay Johnston's _Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest 
Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the 
Bill)_. Johnston is an investigative reporter and New York Times writer 
specializing in tax and economic matters.

Following Johnston's previous book, Perfectly Legal, Free Lunch continues 
the analysis of why it is that the average worker earns today, in dollars 
adjusted for inflation, less than in 1973, while the rates and amounts of 
capital accumulation and appreciation by the top half of a percent of 
Americans are beyond the practical imagination of most individuals.

NPR's Teri Gross interviewed Johnston on Fresh Air yesterday.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17808622 

For an inter-semester-break diversion from assigned readings, I found 
interesting (again) some of the sea battle stories by Patrick O'Brian 
featuring the Aubrey-Maturin pair of characters. Lots of interesting 
sailing details, and realistic depiction of eighteenth-century naval 
warfare between England and France. Master and Commander is the first in 
this series of twenty novels; I'd recommend as many of them as available 
reading time will allow.

Also published in 2007 by O'Reilly Press was the first edition of _bash 
Cookbook_, an excellent exploration of the bash shell (Bourne again shell), 
the most widely used combination command interpreter and scripting language 
for Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X. I haven't worked through all of it yet, but 
so far it has shown itself to be a practical collection of information for 
Linux command-line adventures.

Another volume parts of which I have sampled recently is _American 
Conservatism: An Encyclopedia_, edited by Frohnen, Beer, and Nelson. This 
978-page tome has 626 articles by more than 200 contributors, and may be 
the most authoritative reference on American conservatism now available. 
Regardless of one's political spectrum position, there is some interesting 
reading here, and when disgust settles in, it doubles as a door-stop.

If you're interested in leafing through a trade paperback designed like a 
1960's high school yearbook with mostly black-and-white photos -- none 
candid -- and lots of statistical information about the State of Idaho and 
its incumbent government, there is the 2007-2008 Idaho Bluebook published 
by the Secretary of the State. I mention this last volume because I was 
jarred a little closer to reality by an Argonaut article recently that 
featured front-page statistics showing the University of Idaho third in 
enrollment behind Boise State University and Idaho State University. What? 
Since when did this happen, and what other Idaho statistical facts of life 
have I missed? So, the Bluebook answers a few questions numerically and 
stylistically, about Idaho's official view of itself.


Ken