(c) by Mark Dempsey
Both Sasha Abramsky's recent Bee column decrying the treatment of immigrant children and the comments from the political right in response aren't so much lying as changing the subject. Currently, 40% of America's population does not have $400 in savings to deal with an emergency. Medical bankruptcy threatens sick people. Poverty, joblessness, and their knock-on effects in crime, incarceration, homelessness and even starvation and opioid overdose are much bigger problems than Abramsky's worry about "thugs" in power and the intrusive government those opposing him decry. Separating immigrants from their children, right or wrong, is small potatoes in comparison. But whenever possible, the officious, [ahem!] I mean "official" commentariat and their sanctioned opponents prefer straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel.
America's net worth declined by 40% in the wake of Lehman's bankruptcy in 2007. Meanwhile, although Clinton's signature on financial deregulation enabled this, the same banksters whose Ponzi capitalism crashed the economy are not in jail. They're at large and doing pretty much what they did before. Letting them off with cost-of-doing-business fines was one of Barack Obama's big crimes.
Not his biggest crime, though; after all, he didn't prosecute the war crimes of Bush/Cheney, either... and yes, it's still a war crime to torture. Obama didn't prosecute the torturers, he promoted them and prosecuted the whistle blowers.
Boss Tweed's saying "I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates" seems to apply here.
Meanwhile, from the political right, critics of government believe they can simply ignore systemic problems and attribute all genuine progress to individual effort only. What's a systemic problem? If you throw 95 bones out your back door, then let 100 dogs retrieve them, no matter how responsible, skilled and law-abiding those dogs are, five are not going to get a bone. We're short of jobs. No matter how well-trained and responsible are job seekers, both wages and labor participation are not going to rise until that shortage declines.
Another systemic problem: those "illegal aliens" (actually "undocumented workers"). The U.S. has been attacking its neighbors south of its borders literally for centuries. Between 1798 and 1994, the U.S. was responsible for 41 changes of government in the Caribbean, Central and South America. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even persuaded the Obama administration to tolerate a military coup in Honduras. Their democratically-elected government was going to raise the Honduran minimum wage from 60¢ an hour (the nerve of those people!)...so the generals had to take over, obviously. Meanwhile, 30,000 unaccompanied Honduran minors came north to avoid the ensuing chaos.
The U.S. attacks economically, too. Conspiring with Newt Gingrich, Clinton signed NAFTA, and real wages in Mexico declined 34%. One has to return to the Great Depression to find a wage drop like that in the U.S. and that prompted no great migration...oh wait! the Okies!
One might guess that shipping a lot of subsidized Iowa corn to Mexico would adversely effect Mexican subsistence corn farmers. Sure, corn is only arguably the most important food crop in the world, and those Mexican corn farmers were keeping the diversity of the corn genome alive, but they weren't making any money for Monsanto, darn them! So ... let them come north to mow our lawns and paint our houses.
The right-wing critique of government also doesn't mention the advantages of big, enlightened sponsors of research, either. For example: 75% of pharmaceutical innovation comes from government-sponsored research. Most of the iPhone components that matter (transistors, microprocessors, lithium-ion battery, touch screens, the internet, GPS, etc.) are the product of government-sponsored research (see the graphic here).
Government is the way we handle systemic problems; individuals cannot do that.
I do regret U.S. aggression, but, like racism, religious prejudice and xenophobia, the undocumented are a distraction. Calling each side of the political aisle names ("thugs" "liars") is also a distraction.These distractions divide and conquer the population so that ignoring systemic problems can remain respectable, and ignoring the crimes of one's own party can continue. The debate between pro- and anti-immigrant factions are distractions, and distractions win as long as we don't get some candidates Boss Tweed didn't pick.
Both Sasha Abramsky's recent Bee column decrying the treatment of immigrant children and the comments from the political right in response aren't so much lying as changing the subject. Currently, 40% of America's population does not have $400 in savings to deal with an emergency. Medical bankruptcy threatens sick people. Poverty, joblessness, and their knock-on effects in crime, incarceration, homelessness and even starvation and opioid overdose are much bigger problems than Abramsky's worry about "thugs" in power and the intrusive government those opposing him decry. Separating immigrants from their children, right or wrong, is small potatoes in comparison. But whenever possible, the officious, [ahem!] I mean "official" commentariat and their sanctioned opponents prefer straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel.
America's net worth declined by 40% in the wake of Lehman's bankruptcy in 2007. Meanwhile, although Clinton's signature on financial deregulation enabled this, the same banksters whose Ponzi capitalism crashed the economy are not in jail. They're at large and doing pretty much what they did before. Letting them off with cost-of-doing-business fines was one of Barack Obama's big crimes.
Not his biggest crime, though; after all, he didn't prosecute the war crimes of Bush/Cheney, either... and yes, it's still a war crime to torture. Obama didn't prosecute the torturers, he promoted them and prosecuted the whistle blowers.
Boss Tweed's saying "I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates" seems to apply here.
Meanwhile, from the political right, critics of government believe they can simply ignore systemic problems and attribute all genuine progress to individual effort only. What's a systemic problem? If you throw 95 bones out your back door, then let 100 dogs retrieve them, no matter how responsible, skilled and law-abiding those dogs are, five are not going to get a bone. We're short of jobs. No matter how well-trained and responsible are job seekers, both wages and labor participation are not going to rise until that shortage declines.
Another systemic problem: those "illegal aliens" (actually "undocumented workers"). The U.S. has been attacking its neighbors south of its borders literally for centuries. Between 1798 and 1994, the U.S. was responsible for 41 changes of government in the Caribbean, Central and South America. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even persuaded the Obama administration to tolerate a military coup in Honduras. Their democratically-elected government was going to raise the Honduran minimum wage from 60¢ an hour (the nerve of those people!)...so the generals had to take over, obviously. Meanwhile, 30,000 unaccompanied Honduran minors came north to avoid the ensuing chaos.
The U.S. attacks economically, too. Conspiring with Newt Gingrich, Clinton signed NAFTA, and real wages in Mexico declined 34%. One has to return to the Great Depression to find a wage drop like that in the U.S. and that prompted no great migration...oh wait! the Okies!
One might guess that shipping a lot of subsidized Iowa corn to Mexico would adversely effect Mexican subsistence corn farmers. Sure, corn is only arguably the most important food crop in the world, and those Mexican corn farmers were keeping the diversity of the corn genome alive, but they weren't making any money for Monsanto, darn them! So ... let them come north to mow our lawns and paint our houses.
The right-wing critique of government also doesn't mention the advantages of big, enlightened sponsors of research, either. For example: 75% of pharmaceutical innovation comes from government-sponsored research. Most of the iPhone components that matter (transistors, microprocessors, lithium-ion battery, touch screens, the internet, GPS, etc.) are the product of government-sponsored research (see the graphic here).
Government is the way we handle systemic problems; individuals cannot do that.
I do regret U.S. aggression, but, like racism, religious prejudice and xenophobia, the undocumented are a distraction. Calling each side of the political aisle names ("thugs" "liars") is also a distraction.These distractions divide and conquer the population so that ignoring systemic problems can remain respectable, and ignoring the crimes of one's own party can continue. The debate between pro- and anti-immigrant factions are distractions, and distractions win as long as we don't get some candidates Boss Tweed didn't pick.
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