Great article!

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsbu ... 81283.html

A symbol of our coming chaos

By Donald Collins
Saturday, November 25, 2006


On Oct. 27, my wife, Sally, and I awoke at 5 a.m. in our Northwest Washington, D.C., home to start on a business trip to Chicago. We decided to get breakfast at Dulles International Airport.
We were at Dulles at 6:20 a.m. The line at the United Economy fare line was staggeringly long. But by 7 a.m. we actually had our tickets in time to press on the next huge line to get through security.

This took another 40 minutes, punctuated by a TSA employee confiscating my wife's prescription toothpaste, her eyebrow liner dispenser, her anti-bacterial hand lotion and her nail polish. Actually, the TSA lady was very nice and deftly took only a couple of minutes to extract what Sally admittedly should have not taken in her carry-on luggage.

One of those famous Dulles personnel carrier buses lumbered from the A Terminal -- the one in the front -- to the C Terminal. We arrived at the C Terminal, got to the proper gate at 7:52 a.m., just in time to learn that the Chicago flight had been delayed until 9 a.m.

Consequently, we had plenty of time for Southwest Burrito, the only food service in sight, which was not bad, and read in a Washington Post article about how no protective wall to keep out invaders works.

The Great Wall of China would have worked better. But the Ming Dynasty came down anyway. There may be a lesson for all of us here: No wall works if the will of the government that builds it fails! That Chinese government showed stupidity and venality, something our own government appears to want to emulate.

So why tell you of this common snafu of modern travel, one which we all experience frequently?

Because if our leaders for the past 35 years had been thinking about the national interest instead of their personal interests, we wouldn't have 300 million people crowded into systems that are becoming increasingly dysfunctional for the average citizen.

If our captains of industry hadn't decided to import cheap slave labor while paying our Congress to look the other way, building any wall would not be necessary. And our population would be about 225 million, not on the way to 500 million by 2050 and 1 billion by 2100.

Here they are backdating their stock options and paying themselves salaries 369 times the average wage of the hourly wage workers in their companies while paying lobbyists, who outnumber the elected officials in Congress 5-to-1, to keep the borders open.

These worthies can well afford to take their corporate jets above the maddening delays at the nation's airports and send their kids to well-run private schools while watching their minions on the Hill avoid enforcing the laws on the books, let alone enacting urgently needed controls on immigration.

Of course, with all this imported cheap labor around, our kids get to hang out in malls instead of cutting the grass or helping with other chores at home or get a summer job like my generation did. Then, we learned punctuality and the value of manual labor as a powerful inducement to not do it later in life if possible.

So send our young men and women off to foreign wars and then don't offer them the GI education bill if they don't get killed. Or if kids do get to college, be sure the tuition is exorbitantly high so they can graduate with an indebtedness so big it would have bought a very nice house in my era.

So what will this election prove? Controlling the incoming House are Open Border Democrats headed by Nancy Pelosi. The majority of the Senate already is "open border," as is our president.

Oh, yes, I know you can't wait to know how our trip ended. We finally got to Chicago, coming out of our jetway just in time to hear the public address announcer saying that Homeland Security had raised the terror alert level to Orange (for reasons, of course, no one knew).

Fortunately, our hotel was right across the street and we got to our room exhausted at 11 a.m. local time -- a simple door-to-door transit of 7 hours.

This sort of uncomfortable daily life circumstance is happening all over America in our large cities. And it is not going to get better until we understand the price of being slaves to these captains of industry is very high indeed.

As long as they can buy Congress and the White House, we poor middle-class and blue-collar citizens are in for a worse drubbing.

Watch what happens to our schools. You think they are bad now? And what about our public services?

We are moving into a soup of people. No one will know what to do. The rule of law will be breached again and again. And most of us won't even know it. The dissolution of our great country will continue if we don't get control of our elected officials and bring this corporate oligarchy to heel.

Endless growth, open borders, loss of public services we pay for to the growing hordes of legal and illegal aliens, elections paid for by the special interests instead of a system of government-funded campaigns paid for from the tax stream, out-of-control spending by both parties, national debt beyond our ability to pay for it ever are but a few of the impending disasters.

The solutions are numerous:

• The wall approved by Bush (as an 11th-hour political promise) is a start (if it ever gets built)

• Stick with paper ballots until we are assured that electronic ones work

• Force public financing for all national elections and gradually work toward such funding at the state and local levels

• Cut illegal immigration through proper IDs, making employers personally liable for hiring illegals

• Bring immigration levels back to "replacement"; be conscious that more population is not necessary

• Make our foreign policy one of conciliation and cooperation, not arrogance and lack of openness

• Stop using the threat of terror to steal our civil rights and undermine our democracy.

Quite a laundry list, although one that could realistically be accomplished over several election cycles. But we must begin with immigration reform as No. 1 right now. Five-hundred million people by 2050 will make urban America uninhabitable.

Donald A. Collins, a former Greensburg resident, is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C., and a board member of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.