Tag Archives: immigration

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

American carnage.

Leave a comment

It is possible to kill people with your mouth, particularly when you’re president of the United States. I’m referring to the kind of rhetoric that has broad public impact rather than speech that sets deadly official policies in motion – both kill, and we should take both very seriously. In the wake of the El Paso shooting, it’s that first kind that calls for extra examination. A president’s public expressions of hate, bigotry, whatever, provide space for extremists and overzealous citizens to act.  Nixon called student anti-war protesters a bunch of bums, and before long we saw Kent State. Now Trump has done the same thing, except to a much more explicit degree.

As he did three years ago, Trump is centering his campaign on fear of brown immigrants. Not immigrants in general, you understand – he doesn’t seem to have a problem with people from Canada or “Normay”. The president claims repeatedly and consistently that the United States is being “invaded” by large numbers of undocumented aliens bent on committing serious felonies. He and his administration have implemented multiple scare campaigns about dark caravans moving northward, populated by Muslim terrorists and criminals from “Mexican countries”, your placid suburban backyard squarely in their sites. They have pushed for a Great Wall of Ignorance along the southern U.S. border, though I have yet to hear of any corresponding structure along our northern border (or, for that matter, around our airports, as that is how so many people who overstay their visas enter this country).

Photo of sociopaths posing with orphan infant

We’ve all heard the administration’s childish gaslighting on this issue, as well as that of their supporters in Congress. Good luck with that. They can’t run away from their own shouted words. They have been waving the bloody shirt since before they arrived in Washington … it’s a little late to claim that they don’t mean to rile people up with their contant talk of demographic Armageddon. In his poorly-crafted inaugural (honestly, Steven Miller is objectively the worst speechwriter ever to serve a president), Trump spoke of “American Carnage”. What we are seeing now is exactly that – a continuation of the mindless death toll generated by our gun-obsessed society, but also a resurgence of right-wing violence directed at the targets of Trump’s tirades. Ordinarily these movements fade during Republican presidencies, but this time around they know they have a friend in the White House, regardless of his hostage-video statements of condemnation against white supremacy.

This administration is an American fascist’s dream come true. Now all they have to do is keep him in office. That’s what we’re up against.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Fading to black.

Leave a comment

We all knew he would get an early start, and true to form, sixteen months before the general election, Donald Trump has completely poured himself into being Drunk Uncle Twitter Troll, spewing overtly racist attacks on duly elected members of the House of Representatives while his Republican colleagues lamely play rhetorical defense, desperate to hold onto their party’s precious rubber-stamp chief executive who is giving them all they ever wanted and more. Pretty amazing to hear the likes of GOP congressman Tom Cole on NPR gaslighting us all on the issue of whether or not Trump is race-baiting (clue: Cole says “no”), then engaging in some truly ridiculous what-about-ism (speaking to NPR correspondent Noel King):

KING: You just don’t think it was racist.
COLE: No, I don’t.
KING: OK.
COLE: And frankly, I also think that if you – you have to remember here, too, there’s – we’ve had colleagues that are routinely called down by presiding officers for using inappropriate language toward the president. We’ve had people that have said federal workers are running concentration camps. We’ve had people that have said if you support Israel, you do it for the money. We’ve had people that have referred to the president with vulgar epithets and said they’re going to impeach him. None of those people were subject to resolution. So the double standard here, in terms of accepting comments on your own side of the aisle and criticizing essentially – what, you know, others might think are a similar thing to another is just – you know, it’s breathtakingly inappropriate.

(NPR Morning Edition, July 17, 2019)

See what he did there? He literally attacked the same four representatives Trump baited on Twitter. Cole predicated this on his earlier statement that the president’s tweets about the four congresswomen of color were “inappropriate” and “offensive”, but not racist. That little twist makes the president’s comments equivalent to, for example, Rashida Talib’s using the word “ass” when talking about impeaching Trump, or Ilhan Omar making virtually the same observation about the effect of AIPAC political contributions that Thomas Friedman made without any negative reaction. This is a standard package of what-about-ism that Republican strategists whipped up quickly over the last day or two, and they’re all reading from the same hymnal.

Drunk uncle twitter troll strikes again.

Of course, the corporate media spends a lot of time pondering whether or not Trump is racist. That’s immaterial. We should have zero interest in what that fool thinks or how he feels. It’s what he projects and works to engender in other people that should concern us. It’s no accident or mere caprice that he chooses the targets he chooses, as I’ve said here before. It all follows the same theme, from the birther conspiracy, to bashing immigrants from Mexico at his campaign launch, to announcing his Muslim ban, to telling the toxic lie about Muslims celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey, to calling out Colin Kapernik or any one of a dozen women of color in Congress. It’s about othering people. It’s about framing black, brown, and non-Christian people as not true Americans, somehow disloyal, a fifth column, from somewhere else. Even his claim that 3 million undocumented immigrants voted in 2016 rolls into this – he’s basically saying that the margin of popular vote victory for Clinton was delivered by people with no right to vote … people of color.

This is not just Trump being Trump. This is his 2020 campaign, and it will get worse, just wait and see.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Skin game.

Leave a comment

Not so very long ago – within the span of many Americans’ lifetimes – crossing the southern border wasn’t that big of a deal. People from Mexico and points south would make their way into the U.S. for seasonal work mostly, do the jobs Americans tend not to want to do, then make their way back. Most of them wouldn’t stay very long because they had families back in Mexico, so they might travel back and forth as their work allowed, bringing their meager earnings back with them. There was an explicit guest worker program during World War II, but otherwise it was kind of an informal, administrative matter for many years.

Gradually, though, immigration across the southern border became more heavily policed. The option to harass migrant workers and other visitors was always available to law enforcement, but in more recent decades it became a matter of policy. As PBS journalist John Carlos Frey details in his new book, Blood and Sand, the crackdown really began in earnest during the Clinton Administration, reflected most shockingly in Clinton’s second State of the Union, which included a section on undocumented immigrants that might have been ripped from Trump’s current playbook. There were a couple of things going on in those days. Implementation of NAFTA was decimating rural agriculture in Mexico, pitting small farmers against U.S. agribusiness conglomerates. But most importantly, politicians were re-discovering the efficacy of targeting brown people. Clinton and the Republican Congress funded the construction of walls in major border cities, forcing migrants into the harsh desert and mountain terrain that straddles the border between populated areas.

Not the desired effect.

Similar to Trump’s policies now, Clinton’s approach was formulated specifically to discourage people from even attempting to cross into the U.S. The result was a spike in migrant deaths as families and individuals continued to be driven north by need and in search of safety and sustenance. That policy set the template that we have operated under ever since, though Bush, Obama, and now into Trump. Of course, Trump has ratcheted up the pressure, making it impossible to adjudicate asylum claims, incarcerating immigrants regardless of their personal histories, treating all crossers like murderers, rapists, gang members, etc., holding terrified people – even children and infants – in squalid, dehumanizing conditions under the hateful eye of bigoted officers.

We have to take the administration at their word that they’re doing this to discourage migrants fleeing the remnants of the countries we worked so hard to destroy in past decades. That makes Trump and his crew terrorists, plain and simple – they are deliberately terrorizing people for political ends, and the longer we tolerate it the more complicit we are in these crimes against humanity.

luv u,

jp

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

Political Rants

State of it, 2019.

Leave a comment

I would be remiss not to comment, first of all, on the style and delivery of Trump’s second State Of The Union address this past Tuesday night. Plainly, he is terrible at reading from a teleprompter. I don’t know whether it’s a vision issue or some pathology further back in that thick skull of his, but man goddamn, what a horrible read. Beyond that, though, he obviously did not rehearse the speech to any significant degree. It was a rocky road, prosody-wise, for little lord Trump-leroy from beginning to end. An embarrassing performance all around.

As for the content, just a couple of points:

Really cares about those kids.Immigration. Beyond the same lies, distortions, and barely concealed bigotry that usually erupt from his festering maw, Trump used the well-worn SOTU practice of using guests as rhetorical human shields in his argument for the Wall, greater immigration enforcement, and so on. This time it was family members of a U.S. citizen victim murdered by an MS13 member. Of course, Trump could bring in dozens of such cases if he can find them, and it would no more prove his case than this sorry demonstration. People get murdered in America, including a relatively small number at the hands of immigrants. Crucially, his “get tough” policy makes these victims less safe. By rounding up undocumented aliens by the thousands, Trump’s agents are creating a strong disincentive for members of that community to call the cops when they either witness or become victimized by gang activity. Just more evidence that bigotry is not only wrong and immoral – it’s just effing dumb.

Iran Deal. Trump had just told an interviewer a few days ago that he wanted to keep troops on an American base in Iraq to “keep an eye on Iran” – something he apparently failed to discuss with the Iraqi government. Then, in this remarkably poorly-wrought SOTU address, the old man railed against the Islamic Republic, calling it the most prominent state sponsor of terror and accusing it of doing “bad things” in the region. He has adopted the broadly-used imperial rhetoric on Iran, attributing every action carried out by Hezbollah to Tehran. And, of course, they hate Hezbollah because it is an effective fighting force that restricts Israel’s ability to strike  Lebanon at will. That’s what we and the Israeli government call “terrorism”.  Of course, his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord just scotches what was a great deal for the U.S. – a pledge to restrain themselves while we continue to occupy countries on either side of them and threaten them daily. What’s to complain about there?

Oh, right. Obama did it. And John Bolton wants war. How could I have forgotten?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Walls and bridges.

Leave a comment

Another new year, but still the same bullshit: Trump wants to make one of his rhetorical flourishes a reality because he’s afraid of losing his base, and he wants us to pay for it. Welcome to sunny Mexico, my friends. The various pundits and politicians go back and forth on whether Trump’s wall is actually a wall (as the president has said many times) or a metaphor for something called “border security”, which everyone seems to agree with but no one can define. I think they’re missing the obvious answer – Trump is talking about a real “wall”, but the fact that he talks about it is itself a metaphor. He wants to build a big wall that will represent the separation barrier between white and brown people.

On the white side of historyThis is the program Trump inherited from other Republicans like Tom Tancredo, Mitt Romney, and many more.  Obama’s first term, in particular, was an extreme accommodation to it as well. That’s likely because the big lie about invading armies of dark people is an effective distraction for disaffected workers. The bipartisan neoliberal economic experiment that’s been underway for the last forty years is a total failure for working people in this country; Trump is working to deepen that failure, and the only way a politician can maintain some measure of popularity while conducting these deeply unpopular policies is by encouraging working-class white people to blame brown people for all their troubles.

Of course, the lie needs to grow more elaborate with every passing year, reaching remarkable levels of implausibility and ridiculousness and yet they still draw on the old, familiar themes: criminality, disease, uncleanliness. Trump doesn’t dog whistle this stuff – he just says it right out loud. Dog whistles are too subtle to work these days, I suspect. You need a bull horn to drown out the din of an economy that enriches only the rich, despite their claims of full employment. Many millions are out of the workforce and no longer counted; millions more have taken poorly paid jobs or are driving Uber. Wages are stagnant. Trump needs his wall to keep you from noticing how badly this system sucks. If you’re suffering, it’s because of those bad hombres.

We need bridges, not walls. We need to make common cause with workers and families on both sides of our borders. And we need to hold our politicians (of either party) to account when they try to drive us apart.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Borders.

Leave a comment

If there’s one thing about the Trump administration that’s consistent, it’s their laser focus on immigrants – specifically the ones with dark skin or non-christian religious beliefs. This is basically Trump’s political brand, though it’s nothing new in American (and particularly Republican party) politics. This specific strain of bigotry has made its way into national elections for decades, most noticeably since the early 1990s and the Buchanan direct mail scam …. I mean, presidential campaign, right through right-wing hacks like Tom Tancredo and up to the now-sainted (by the phony “resistance”) Senator-elect Mitt Romney, who ran to the right of his fanatical GOP competitors on immigration.  So it makes little sense to assign this tendency exclusively to Trump – scapegoating immigrants is central to Republican politics, and as for Democrats, Obama was the deporter-in-chief, despite his uplifting rhetoric.

These are are the people you're supposed to fearThat said, it’s hard to deny that Trump  takes a certain special joy in his work, promoting the basest forms of ignorance, painting refugees as criminals, rapists, etc. The furor around the immigrant caravans from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador ranks among the most despicable initiatives thus far in his putrid presidency, right alongside family separations. This is, of course, a contrived “crisis” intended to gin up the Republican’s racist base in time for the mid-term elections as well as set the stage for clashes at the southern border. They did this by prohibiting asylum seekers from applying for asylum anywhere other than at designated points of entry. This violates the relevant statute (8 U.S. Code section 1158), as asylum seekers are entitled to due process regardless of how they enter the country.

By funneling these refugees to the major border crossings, the President has ensured that there would be a kind of mini refugee crisis in Tijuana. This is all about how it looks on TV, specifically FoxNews. He wants his followers to see hordes of dark people surging toward the border fence, looking angry, being repelled by our brave men in uniform with a generous use of CS gas (a.k.a. chemical weapons). The President thinks this works for him politically, and to a certain extent he is correct. Older white people, pummeled by the gig economy, terrified of losing what little status they have, are susceptible to this anti-immigrant trope along with its sidecar appeals to anti-black, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim sentiments. They want Trump’s wall, and they want him to build it around their lives. Since that’s impossible, they will settle for a TV show about teargassing refugees.

We are way beyond the point of wondering whether this is the kind of country we want to be. We need to stop wondering and start working towards better policy … now.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Fourteenth.

Leave a comment

Very nearly speechless after the heinous massacre of Jewish congregants in Pittsburgh. I am glad, at least, that reporting on this atrocity has attempted to capture the motivations of this neo-fascist killer. He was driven to attack the Tree of Life Synagogue by his outrage over the work of HIAS, a century-old Jewish organization dedicated to resettlement of refugees from around the world. The president’s, his party’s, and conservative media’s fulminations about the approach of an “invasion” of Honduran refugees, supposedly funded by “globalists” like George Soros, no doubt contributed to the shooter’s sense of urgency. And, of course, he had an AR-15 handy. Why not, right?

Two thumbs up (your ass)How did Trump meet this outrage? By doubling down on his anti-immigrant tirade. By sending hundreds of troops to the border to stop a group of poor people a thousand miles away. And by launching an attack on birthright citizenship, the principle at the core of the fourteenth amendment. It’s almost as if, while attending a memorial service in Pittsburgh, Trump is doing his best to make it up to the Synagogue shooter for falling short of his racist expectations. He seems to be under the impression, no doubt encouraged by the likes of Steven Miller, that he can, as president, undo the 14th Amendment by executive order or, in a pinch, through legislative action. As usual, Trump is skating on top of another constitutional question about which he knows less than nothing.

Regardless of its vacuity, his attack on the notion of citizenship is a toxic ploy one week in advance of the mid-term elections. As with his scare talk about the refugee “caravan” working its way north, Trump is using birthright citizenship as a tool to gin up his most hardcore supporters, including those on the extreme xenophobic right. For them, this speaks to Trump’s core brand proposition – the demonization of people of color that propelled him into the White House on a wave of white resentment. He entered the political arena railing about Obama’s birth certificate; essentially, attempting to undermine the legitimacy of his citizenship and, of course, his presidency, and fostering the notion that black people in general are not full citizens, foreign, illegitimate.

Will the ploy work? Tuesday will tell. All I can say is vote, vote, vote, and encourage others to do the same. Let’s prove him wrong. Let’s put a check on this disaster.

luv u,

jp