Tag Archives: border

Political Rants

Stop hiding your light under that bushel.

Leave a comment

Well, Trump started channeling QAnon in a big way this week at an Ohio rally. I’m assuming anyone who reads this blog knows what QAnon is. It’s basically the blood libel, updated for the modern age. Some idiot posted some random shit on 4chan (which happens basically every second) claiming that s/he is a secret intelligence operative and was spilling tea on upcoming FBI raids on Trump’s political enemies. It was supposed to happen in 48 hours and, of course, it didn’t.

That failure, however, didn’t stop the true believers. These people must be total knuckleheads. Who would earnestly believe this crap? Of course, people have a tendency to believe whatever places them in a positive light. Whatever the case may be, QAnon has a lot of followers, and they are apparently laser-focused on the conspiracy theory. Trump is their greasy, corpulent pope. It makes total sense that he would pull those people close – they are the scrum who never left him.

What they think they’re running on

Trumpist conspiracy theories aside, the Republican party appears to have settled on their central issue for the 2022 mid-term elections: brown people are coming over the border to KILL you. Sure, they’ll carp about inflation, spending, taxes, etc., but when they really want to motivate their voters, nothing works better than a solid dose of bigotry/racism. DeSantis and Abbott are leading the way on this currently, but they’re all saying it, tweeting about it, and trying to fill the airwaves with it as hard as they can.

Our own Claudia Tenney, soon to be the ex-congressmember from NY-22, has been tweeting furiously about the “border crisis” and an unprecedented two million apprehensions of people crossing the border to sew together her garments, grow and harvest her food, care for her sick relatives, and so on, all at tremendously low pay. She’s running for the bright red 24th district seat, so I doubt she has to pander very hard, but she also wants to keep her beloved Trump happy, so it’s under the bus with the brown people. I’m sure her GOP colleagues in the House all have similar motivations for saying the exact same things at the exact same time.

What they’re actually running on

The fact is, the last thing the Republicans want to talk about is what they’re planning on doing if they return to power. The reason for that is simple: their policies are desperately unpopular – politically toxic, even. Unfortunately for them, Florida Senator Rick Scott mapped it all out for them in a very public fashion earlier this year with his 11-Point Plan to Rescue America. He seems to be soft-pedaling it a bit now for some reason, almost like he and his colleagues are afraid of blowing their own horn.

One of his 11 points involves rescuing more tax revenue from working people. It’s basically one of the biggest tax hikes in American history, hitting poor and working families hard. This should surprise no one – for all their complaints about taxes, Republicans have raised our taxes more than a few times in recent decades, particularly in the wake of their 2010 takeover of the House when the eliminated Obama’s Making Work Pay tax credit. Not sure why Scott would think this is a great political move. Is he as stupid as he looks? Perhaps.

Help the kids out, will you?

Hey – Republicans don’t want to say that they will, for instance, ban abortion nationwide if they win back the House, Senate, and Presidency in the next couple of years. So we should say it for them. Let’s get the facts out on their policy positions every chance we get, on social media, in conversation, and elsewhere. They should like that, right?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Imaginary Lines.

Leave a comment

Our press tends to frame subjects in the most superficial ways. I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know, but sometimes it’s so blatant that it hits you in the face. The “crisis on the border” coverage is frankly kind of shocking, a bit like the talk during the Trump years of “caravans” heading north from the “northern triangle” countries we spent decades rendering ungovernable. Practically every outlet has used the term “crisis” in their headlines. I understand the incentive structure here – if it bleeds, it leads – but what they’re referring to is literally more of the same phenomenon we’ve been seeing on the U.S. southern border for years. It certainly isn’t way out of line from recent months. Stats compiled on Factcheck.org, from CBP numbers, show that crossings are not nearly as high as they were in May 2019 and more or less even with March, April, and June of that year. Was their hair on fire back then?

This is probably a good week to point out that this “crisis” keeps happening because we don’t take any meaningful steps to address it, just as might be said of mass shootings in America. It’s the classic definition of insanity, right? Granted, the influx of people from Central America is not down to one simple cause, but this thing that the right professes to hate like fire is largely a product of the toxic policies they and many of their liberal adversaries have been pursuing since the Second World War and longer. Why are people leaving Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and other Central American countries in such large numbers? Because they are failed states, in essence, thanks in no small measure to the so-called anticommunist crusades we undertook in the region from the first decades of the last century. Between bad governance, corruption, and dominance by criminal cartels funded through drug sales to the United States, the northern triangle nations are virtually unlivable for most of their battered citizens. That’s the return on our investment in fascistic governments.

Then there’s the border itself. It’s an imaginary line bristling with armed officers. The fact that it’s highly militarized and that it’s very difficult to make the crossing means that when people come here, they tend to want to stay. I’m not someone who thinks that immigration is an intrinsically bad thing, but there was a time when people could cross the border without a lot of trouble, stay for a while, work, send money home, then return to their families. Now if they manage to survive the crossing, they stay put and send for their families. The very efforts designed to keep people out is, in essence, keeping them in. Frankly, it’s fortunate for us that people want to come here and work. These “illegal immigrants” include many, many essential workers. Think about that for a moment: both illegal and essential. They get food to our tables. They take care of our grandparents. They do the jobs most Americans shun. Why the fuck do we put a target on their backs?

As I said previously, these are not simple issues that can be solved easily. We need to get our heads around what’s causing this misery, year after year, and try to work towards solutions that are radical in that they would necessarily dismantle the systems of oppression and exclusion that we have built over the course of our history. Or …. we could find something easy to do, and just keep complaining about it. Up to us.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Them-ism.

Leave a comment

This week started with our president, Donald Trump, threatening to close our southern border, from the Gulf to the Pacific, to keep brown people from entering the United States. There’s nothing surprising about this display – immigration is Trump’s signature issue, specifically the demonization of anyone attempting to emigrate from what he would term as “shit hole” countries. And yet, he seems hell-bent on policies that are practically guaranteed to increase the flow of migrants and refugees from south of the border rather than stem it. The recent increase in apprehensions of undocumented immigrants is illustrative of this.

Of course, part of the increase is simply due to the time of year – people are trying to cross before the summer heat sets in. But I think it’s pretty obvious that Trump’s hateful and aggressive policies and rhetoric on this issue are prompting desperate families and individuals to attempt the crossing between ports of entry, which have effectively been closed to asylum seekers. Bear in mind that it is completely within their legal rights to present themselves for an asylum claim wherever they cross, whether it’s at designated points of entry or in-between. By making it impossible for migrants to present their case in an orderly and timely fashion, the administration is leaving them no alternative to making the crossing at some other point. These are people who have no home to return to. Many have friends, family in the U.S. Threatening a total closure of the border only increases the urgency.

That wall makes your ass look big.

I think Trump’s policies may reflect a view of these migrant families as something akin to animals. It’s as if they don’t expect these people to have human concerns or any level of perception. Migrants are, in fact, reacting in understandable ways to the threats being hurled at them. Is it possible that Trump doesn’t understand that?

Call me a cynic, but I think the administration knows that their policies and rhetoric increase undocumented immigration. They want to create a sense of crisis so that their voters will remain in a state of frenzy over the impending invasion of caravans of brown people. Though I suspect they may be a little reluctant to follow through on their threat to close the border “100 percent”, as Trump has said. As much as he affects not to like NAFTA, it is the law of the land, and as such, there’s a tremendous amount of cross-border commerce, supply chain activity, etc., not to mention many, many thousands of people crossing back and forth on a daily basis. Closing the border would effectively shut down large sectors of our industrial base, throwing a monkey wrench into what is literally Trump’s only substantive argument for re-election: the supposedly strong economy. (Strength is a relative thing. It’s stronger than it was, but mostly to the benefit of the wealthy.)

Trump may be an idiot, but he’s probably not enough of a fool bring the economy to a screeching halt in an effort to rile up his bigoted base of supporters. We shall see.

luv u,

jp