Once upon a time, the government created the Labor Department because there seemed to be an issue with employers taking advantage of their workers (see notes on the Pullman riots, or read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair for a little idea on how this used to work). So the Labor Department came into being to make sure that some pretty basic guidelines were followed. You know, little things like, no 12 year olds working 14 hours a day in sweatshops. The kind of thing we hear about Nike doing in Asia and moan about until we go buy the latest version of AirJordans, although I guess they're LeBron's now, sort of like LeCars except not French.

Now if you've ever looked at things I write, it's pretty obvious I don't think much of the current shrub that lost the last election but ended up running the country anyway, but if you look at the last few links on my list, you'll see, the Labor Deapartment putting out a list of ways to SHAFT labor, and a note about changes to the immigration policy.

Now either this is a really unfortunate piece of timing, or the Shrub Administration just explained HOW TO BUILD A THIRD WORLD SWEATSHOP IN THE US FOR FUN AND PROFIT. Hence the title of this. Let's take a job that pays nothing, and has extremely long hours and is already designed with overtime costs built in for the employees to work like dogs and not have anything at the end of the day. How do we do that? Immigrant labor of course.

The highlight of America is that we have gotten ahead not because we had any built in advantage, it was because we worked harder and better and more creatively than the next guy. Collectively we did that better than the next country too.

Now we've decided that smarter isn't good enough, we have to copy how they do things in the worst parts of the world. We grew out of that 100 years ago.

There was a big joke in the 2000 Presidential campaign about "building a bridge to the future." Instead the joke is on us because this President wants to drag the 19th century back into daily life. Life in the middle ages was nasty brutish and short. It was better but still bad in the 19th, and call me an elitist snob, but I like running water.