Two of my biggest gripes about AP have been their strident editorialism masking as "news," and their apparent disregard for facts when the facts go contrary to the reporter's agenda.
Today's example is this...DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - When it comes to squandering the earth's natural resources, residents of this desert land of chilled swimming pools, monster 4x4s and air-conditioned malls are on a par with even the ravenous consumption of Americans, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
The average person in the Emirates puts more demand on the global ecosystem than any other, giving the country the world's largest per-capita "ecological footprint," WWF data shows. The United States runs second.
But the oil-rich Emirates is considered a developing country, and even as a signatory to the United Nations' Kyoto protocol on global warming, is not required to cut emissions. The United States is no longer bound by Kyoto, which the Bush administration rejected after taking office in 2001.
For the record, the United States has NEVER been "bound by Kyoto." The Bush administration no more "rejected" Kyoto than the previous administration did--it was the United States Senate, which holds the sole power of treaty ratification, that soundly and unanimously rejected the Kyoto protocol in 1997 even before Al Gore symbolically signed it a year later, a wee bit before the current administration took office. Neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration submitted the Protocol to the Senate in the face of the Senate's unanimous pre-emptive "rejection."
This is naked issue advocacy disguised as "news." It relies on a politically-interpreted non-peer-reviewed meta-report from a special interest group as the major "data" source. It contains some gross factual inaccuracies.
What happened to the AP's vaunted super-duper-fact-check-system? You know, the thing that makes them vastly superior to every blogger that ever crawled out of the primordial ooze to tap on a keyboard?? The truth is this went through how many levels of the editorial process and not one person saw anything wrong with it. One may be forgiven if things like this make one believe it was approved because editors agreed with its political sentiment.
The second story comes from Slate: The Unwilling Americans, More jobs the native-born won't do.
Last week, I wrote about the phenomenon of jobs Americans aren't willing to do. If companies can't hire the number of people they want to hire at the wages they want to pay, the reasoning goes, it must be because lazy, soft-handed Americans simply aren't willing to roll up their sleeves and do difficult jobs. Managing hedge funds and starring in reality TV shows? Absolutely. But, by this logic, not landscaping, picking fruits and vegetables, meat processing, manufacturing carpets, soldiering, or working in information technology.
In fact, the perceived shortages have less to do with a declining American work ethic and more to do with managerial stinginess. In many industries, employers—and, ultimately, their customers—simply aren't willing to pay the prices that legal American labor demands in exchange for performing the work—or for going through the expense and trouble of obtaining the skills and credentials necessary to ply certain trades. In today's Wall Street Journal, Evan Perez and Corey Dade offer support for this contention. Last September, a chicken-processing plant (one of those industries we're told Americans reject) in Stillmore, Ga., lost three-quarters of its work force after an immigration bust. In response, the company, Crider, "suddenly raised pay at the plant" by more than a dollar per hour and began offering better benefits: "free transportation from nearby towns and free rooms in a company-owned dormitory near to the plant." Miraculously, American workers materialized to accept the jobs.
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Transportation is another area in which demographics, the desire to hold down costs, and rising demand are combining to create a "shortage." Two readers pointed me to a 2005 report released by the American Trucking Association and economic consulting firm Global Insight, which concludes that Americans' unwillingness to work as long-haul truckers could have dire consequences for the U.S. economy. As the press release notes, in 2005 the United States had a shortage of 20,000 truck drivers. Given economic growth and the graying of today's drivers, the industry will need 539,000 new drivers over the next decade. The study notes that if U.S. companies want to continue to enjoy cheap, reliable truck-based shipping, the industry will have to recruit more women and minorities, boost wages so that trucking pays more than construction, and address quality-of-life issues.
But that sort of thinking—raise wages to attract domestic workers into your field—is so last century. In today's flat world, employers can choose from a global labor pool, apparently even for driving big rigs down I-95.
It still surprises me that the rank and file of the unions are still letting "their leaders" champion illegal immigration. It their jobs that are next.
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