Wednesday, April 09, 2008

A little race with your stocks

-- by Dave

Investors Business Daily has always been prone to running with bizarre far-right crap -- during the 1990s there wasn't a Clinton conspiracy they wouldn't promote, including some New World Order and Y2K fearmongering. It's a handy place for stocks news, but you wouldn't want to bet the farm on the accuracy of their news.

This week, though, Hatewatch reports that they've finally leapt off the cliff and into outright promotion of white-supremacist kookery:
Last Friday, a highly conservative publication called Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) published an editorial on its website called "The Real Cost of Immigration" that previewed a report to be released [Tuesday] at the National Press Club -- an analysis, as IBD noted, by one Edwin S. Rubenstein that is being published by The Social Contract journal. What IBD didn't bother to tell its readers was the troubling truth about Rubenstein's politics and those of his Michigan publisher.

According to IBD, Rubenstein’s report, “The Fiscal Impact of Immigration: An Analysis of the Costs to 15 Federal Departments and Agencies,” concludes that every immigrant to the United States costs taxpayers more than $9,000. That’s vastly more than other analyses have concluded, and no mention whatsoever is made of what most economists agree on —that immigrants, legal and otherwise, help grow the economy in ways that actually increase jobs for native Americans. But that's no surprise, given where Rubenstein and his publisher are coming from.

The truth is that Rubenstein is a man who has written for years for a racist anti-immigration website called VDARE -- short for Virginia Dare, said to be the first white child born in the New World. He also writes for the white supremacist National Policy Institute. Last spring, the institute released a report, prepared with Rubenstein’s help, that paints “a statistical and narrative portrait of the war on white America,” in the website’s words. Nicholas Stix’s introduction to the article describes the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling outlawing school segregation as “arguably the worse decision in the Court’s 216 year history.” He claims later civil rights legislation was unconstitutional. “[I]ntegration and the civil rights movement led directly to the destruction of great cities,” he concludes.

The other day, Paul Rosenberg at OpenLeft, in reviewing Glenn Greenwald's excellent new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling The Big Myths of Republican Politics,, observed that this is how garbage from all quadrants -- including the far racist right -- makes its way into mainstream-conservative media. This is, of course, a live and current example, which has been the case for the immigration debate generally.

Trust me: Before long, you're going to hear folks like Lou Dobbs and Michael Savage citing the IBD report as accurate.

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