INDY500 said:
Don't believe every former French foreign minister/diplomat/political activist that comes along.
That's a ridiculous cop-out, particularly since these opinions of mine have absolutely nothing to do with him. In fact, the minute I read "foreign minister of France," I stopped reading, and decided to reply (I have issues with France that are quite complicated
).
Attract is a more apt verb than suck.
Don't let your jingoism resort you to petty semantics, because you damn well know that they mean substantially the same thing, in this context.
If you wanna call 1,266,000, "anti-immigrant xenophobia," because that's how many immigrants became legal permanent residents of the U.S. in 2006. Does any other country in the world come close to that?
With U.S. citizenship in such high demand, it's not "xenophobic" to choose new residents on the basis of our needs and their skills and education. Unless you think a non-controlled flood of low-skill/wage immigrants is preferable.
Aside from statistics, how many immigrants do you know? I know a few; one, after graduating from college, tried to stay, but ended up deported back to Malaysia, because the process has horrendously backlogged since 9/11. She has decided to stay there, and has prospered there. Her story is not unique, and is actually a great point of what I wrote. The "best and brightest" from around the world, who would normally find a legal way to stay in the U.S. after graduation are instead finding themselves confronted by a bureaucratic nightmare, and, in many cases, being deported. This, in turn, has discouraged many others from trying to come here in the first place, because we are developing an international reputation for being unwelcome to immigrants.
Another is a pharmacist in Florida, who is still here, but is under fairly consistent worry that he'll end up being deported someday, because, again, the backlog for processing permanent residency applications is terrible. To add insult to injury, certain fees and forms in the application have annual expiration dates, which are
not given any leniency, despite the backlog, so if they actually review your application, you might get a terse response that certain forms have expired and you have to fill them out again...which then delays things further. He's spent well over $10,000 at this point, between the initial filing/fees and the refiling/repayment of certain fees.
This is the "anti-immigrant xenophobia" I'm talking about, not some amnesty for low-skilled illegal immigrant labor (which I do not support, if I may add). The way we treat our
legal immigants is borderline criminal.
Right. The "magic" isn't over...IT'S SPREADING!
Right...so if a pharmaceutical company is making billions of dollars from a patented drug that they've developed, for instance, and the patent expires so that every other company can develop generics, would you say that the "magic is over" or that the "magic is spreading"? I'll give you an answer that doesn't involve "magic": that company will see its stock price tank if it doesn't proactively develop a new drug that can be patented.
The same analogy works with the U.S. Currently, I'd say that we're a bit lacking in magic. Our response over the last few years has not been to develop anything new; it has been to approve corporate mergers. Sorry to say, I've never known a merger to do anything more than reduce competition and make a company even more conservative in its management outlook than before. It's that "conservatism" that's hurting us, in the long run. Stock prices don't mean shit, if you're not actually making anything unique.
I Agree. Would you include increased nuclear usage and new drilling offshore and in ANWR?
I'm a strong proponent of nuclear power, and have been for a long time here. I'd even go as far as to support spent fuel reprocessing, which we banned out of nuclear proliferation concerns (the most common technique generates a small amount of weapons-grade plutonium), but which no other nation followed. Europe has never stopped reprocessing its spent fuel, and appropriately strict oversight should keep the plutonium from getting in the wrong hands. Regardless, new reprocessing techniques being developed might make this debate moot, as they have been created with the hope that it will create "junk plutonium." Yucca Mountain, as such, is basically an irresponsibly wasteful idea.
As for oil drilling, can you say "too little, too late"? Even if we started drilling today, ANWR would require at least a decade of exploration and another decade to generate output. In 20 years, if we were as serious about infrastructure as FDR and Eisenhower were in their days, we could have an entire hydrogen economy completed, and we could tell Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and all those other asinine OPEC nations to take their oil and fuck themselves with it. We would kill two birds with one stone: it could help give us the upper hand again in foreign relations (which would make conservatives happy), and it would help save the environment (which would make liberals happy).
I would say better trade and monetary policies to correct our weakening dollar, trade and budget deficits. Not, however, the labor-pandering anti-NAFTA rhetoric of Clinton & Obama.
The anti-NAFTA rhetoric is particularly funny, inasmuch as anyone paying attention would realize that NAFTA only covers Canada and Mexico. The 800-lb. gorilla in all of this is China, which NAFTA does not cover.
I think we need to be tougher in making sure that free trade is actually being done by free markets, at the very least. China is, perhaps, the shining example of how we compromise our ideals, in the name of greed. We have an authoritarian, communist nation that have few labor laws (and high accident/mortality rates, as a result), few environmental laws, and low pay, not to mention an egregious currency manipulator. In other words, not only does China have conditions that should be abhorrent to any modern democratic nation, but it doesn't even bother to adhere to basic notions of free markets.
How can we ever have "free trade" with nations that are not free? I don't think that "free trade" should be synonymous with "anarchy"; there needs to be some consistent rules involved, and the U.S. is willing to defend this, albeit in haphazard ways. The U.S. and other Western nations are currently suing China at the WTO for banning foreign companies from selling financial information to Chinese companies. Funny how we always seem to know how to defend our banks.