Monthly Archives: September 2006

want fresh veggies? go pick them yourself

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Crackdown on illegal immigrants leads to a shortage of farm workers:

What do you know? The crackdown on illegal immigration has led to a shortage of produce pickers this year.

The tightening of the border with Mexico, begun more than a decade ago but reinforced since May with the deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops, has forced California growers to acknowledge that most of their workers are illegal Mexican migrants. The U.F.W. estimates that more than 90 percent of the state’s farm workers are illegal.

Whaddaya think? Will we see a sudden surge in domestic/native-born workers to fill those jobs?

The bottomline seems to be: do you want to let the stuff rot in the fields or on the shelves?

If we were to somehow get everything picked but at the wages demanded by native-born workers, the prices would be too high for many to buy anything. So it might end up making more sense to leave them to compost rather than dump them in the waste stream.

links for 2006-09-25

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“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”

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someone is weighing his place in history: two things come to mind.

The Carpetbagger Report » Blog Archive » ‘Just a comma’:

BLITZER: Let’s move on and talk a little bit about Iraq. Because this is a huge, huge issue, as you know, for the American public, a lot of concern that perhaps they are on the verge of a civil war, if not already a civil war…. We see these horrible bodies showing up, tortured, mutilation. The Shia and the Sunni, the Iranians apparently having a negative role. Of course, al Qaeda in Iraq is still operating.

BUSH: Yes, you see — you see it on TV, and that’s the power of an enemy that is willing to kill innocent people. But there’s also an unbelievable will and resiliency by the Iraqi people…. Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago. I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there’s a strong will for democracy. (emphasis added)

Now that we have had more military personnel killed in Iraq than civilians on 9/11 and a commitment to keep on keepin’ on til 2009, how is this insignificant? And is this a tacit admission that his legacy is a flyspeck?

Bonus points if you recognize the quote I swiped for the title.