They're Criticizing Lou Dobbs

On Tuesday's Countdown, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann was, understandably, a little proud of himself when he identified John Stossel as one of his "Best Persons In The World"

for his best responsible comment from a guy I bash now, John Stossel, now Fox News. He says he won‘t vote Republican if “conservative means stop all immigration and some other things that conservatives say. If it means the Lou Dobbs kind of rants about immigrants wrecking America, I don‘t subscribe to that. I think immigrants, by and large, do good things for America.”

I don‘t think Mr. Stossel cares what I think. But I think he deserves applause for that.

Olbermann ‘s applause was echoed by thinkprogress.org, the blog of the Center for American Progress , albeit primarily by way of an attack on Dobbs. Welcoming Stossel to GOP TV, Glenn Beck on his radio show on Wednesday discussed (audio below) immigration with him:

STOSSEL: But if it means the Lou Dobbs kind of rants about immigrants wrecking America, I don't subscribe to that. I think immigrants by and large do good things for America.

GLENN: I think immigrants I think we need more immigrants, ones that want to be Americans because those immigrants are the only ones that are reminding us that we better get off our ass, we've got liberty here and we forget about it all the time.

STOSSEL: That's very true. When they were passing all these antismoking rules and I wanted to make the argument that, gee, don't we have freedom of association? Can't the guy who smokes who owns a bar have smoking in his bar? Can't the smokers have some bars? And I went on the street and I asked smoker after smoker, what do you think? Oh, okay, I guess we're just going to have to stand outside. Nobody was outraged except the immigrants. And they would say, I thought America was the land of the free. So you make a good point there.

If we are to believe Stossel, immigrants are good for the U.S.A. because they’re the only people who support unrestricted smoking in public. It skillfully combines two bad arguments: uninhibited smoking, anywhere and everywhere, is really good policy; and immigrants are good because they understand this.

It’s unsurprising that the former ABC correspondent would advance this spurious argument for supporting immigration, apparently of both the legal and illegal variety. It would be a little more jarring to hear the conservative libertarian Stossel ‘fess up: “I support increased immigration because it expands the labor pool and exerts downward pressure on wages and benefits.”

Such candor would not be very sophisticated. But harboring little respect for the American worker fits neatly into the worldview of someone with little respect also for American schoolchildren. And it would hardly disturb corporate interests, which always have been paramount in Stossel’s thinking and commentary, disguised as reporting.

Dobbs has been wrong frequently the past year (especially on ACORN), owing partly to his avid distaste for Barack Obama. Still, on the matter of legal/illegal immigration, his signature issue, he has been largely correct, as when he told an interviewer at his network in 2007

we bring in more than two million immigrants into this country lawfully each and every year? Has anybody on this broadcast, any news organization in the country, said, wait a minute, why in the world are we worrying about illegal immigration into this country and their -- and their situation, before we're worrying about how long it takes to become a lawful immigrant in to this country and what we're doing with people who are playing by the rules? This is upside down. It's wrongheaded.

Often blasted as anti-immigrant and even racist, Dobbs here is urging greater attention to effecting the citizenship of legal immigrants, shortening the time between entrance to the country and full status as Americans. This remains one of the best ways to ensure full rights and privileges for all individuals here legally, advantaging both those who have decided to do it the right way and America.

Mindless Dogma

Herb Stein and John Stossel appeared on Larry King Live Friday night and gave their prescriptions for the domestic auto industry. Stein was strongly in favor of a bailout, suggesting that the federal government "flood the system" with currency and worry about any inflation later.

Stossel, however, was his usual right-wing self, suggesting the automakers go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, then "set a floor and build cool new cars." (I'm not kidding.)

Detroit has built cool new cars in the past. John, do you remember the 1997 GMEV1? The 1997 Plymouth Prowler? The 2001 Pontiac Aztek? The 2003 Hummer H2? The 2004 Chevy SSR? With the exception of the Aztek (possibly) and the Hummer H2 (certainly), of course you don't. They were all "cool new cars" and all failures. And that's not counting any "cool new cars" introduced before 1991. Or any designed and built by foreign automakers, as this exhibit indicates.

You want to "set a floor?" How is this? As Bill Saporito notes in the current issue of Time magazine,

Next year, workers at Ford plants will earn an average $53 an hour with benefits, the result of a breakthrough industry agreement worked out with the UAW in 2007. That's close to the $49 an hour that workers at the transplants average and far below the $71 an hour with benefits that was the old UAW wage, and that was cited by Alabama Senator Richard Shelby as a reason to oppose any bailout. And the cost differential on enginemaking between Detroit and the transplants will narrow to a couple of dollars by 2011.

Go to Chapter 11 bankruptcy, wherein the company gets to blow off its creditors? There was a time when conservatives like Stossel believed in accountability, but if you remember that time, you must be fairly old. And this blithe suggestion of Chapter 11 bankruptcy ignores the likelihood that it would quickly become a Chapter 7 bankruptcy with its liquidation of assets- and disappearance of the company. Former Bush Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham explains:

Just as financial institutions depend on the confidence of those with whom they do business (as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers discovered), automakers depend on the confidence of car buyers. To purchase a car is to make a multiyear commitment: the buyer must have confidence that the manufacturer will survive to provide parts and service under warranty. With a declaration of bankruptcy, that confidence evaporates. Eighty percent of consumers would not even consider buying a car or truck from a bankrupt manufacturer, one recent survey indicates. So once a bankruptcy proceeding got started, the company’s revenue would plummet, leading it to hemorrhage cash to cover its high fixed costs.

That would thwart any attempt at reorganization, and the case would likely move inexorably toward liquidation under Chapter 7 of the federal bankruptcy code. Debtor-in-possession financing — which is what the bankrupt need in order to pay for the continued operation of their business — would not be available in the vast amounts required, given the plunge in revenue.

A bankruptcy filing by even one of the Big Three would probably set in motion a cascade of smaller bankruptcies by suppliers of car parts, as the money the company owed them (which would be classified as an unsecured claim) could not be paid until it exited bankruptcy. And this loss of suppliers would almost certainly overwhelm the other two carmakers. There would also be a severe contraction in the availability of trade credit from suppliers, which amounts to tens of billions of dollars.

Other than that, Stossel knows what he's talking about. Except on virtually any topic.