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Well, Kend, I think you know the answer. It's all about the almighty buck. Employers paying subprime wages. Government agencies like Homeland Security and the border patrol making sure they spend enough to justify their own existence next year, plus ten percent.
Listen, I've thought about it for the last fifteen minutes and I'm outa here. To the people I particularly respect on this blog, palindromedary,2950-10K, philip henderson. et.al, (and Alice in Wonderland if you still sneak a peek;-), adieu. It's been fun, but time to move on.
Every time this topic comes up it blows me away that immigration is even talked about down there. It is very simple. If you are not a citizen of a country you have to get permission to enter that country if you don't and get caught you are deported. That's it. What am I missing here? Every other country in the world follows this simple principle why not the USA? One in five have not had a job there in four years shouldn't that be more important then Pedro's job. Isn't it Mexico's job to look after Mexicans.
Sorry but why is this so important to the left down there? Please help me understand. Anyone.
Thanks for setting me up, DAnneMarc. Historywriter posts a particularly cogent piece and you drag this comment up completely out of context. Whatta guy!
Historywriter, forgive my previous ejaculation. You had just sniped at me twice without naming me and I was feeling a little chafed.
There, does everyone feel better? No, wait, We need Ken ware to come swooping in to "bitch slap" someone around.
This crowd can really get interesting!
historywriter ~ Unless you've already missed, a person I have the utmost respect for has already stated this about you:
Please pardon me if I take the advice of a very esteemed colleague and do not reply. Have a great weekend!
You took the words right out of my mouth, brother!
An excellent response. The best of luck my friend. Smoke the competition!
From what I can see, we dont need anything that either party is selling. They are all bullshit artists.
Where are the jobs? Where are the investigations for financial fraud and lying us into 2 wars?
"Look forward, not backward" chumps.
DAnneMarc: Sorry about the delayed response, the work week is tough on time. Anyway in answer to yesterdays #14, In my opinion the unseen hand of Influence you speak of on President Obama may well be his own worry about the record number of death threats against him. I think this alone may be causing him to tip way right of center with his attitude toward the working class. I often wonder how I would react to extreme threats or danger and then find myself thinking about my ancestors, many of whom fought and died in the Rev war. One is known to have risked his life in raising cash among the patriots on Long Island under the noses of the British army.
Anyway I think Obama would benefit greatly by reading about George Washington's exploits during both the 4th and final French and Indian War and of course the Rev War. Washington trusted in his own destiny and never backed down. The Native Americans sensed this impregnable destiny and often said don't waste your buck and ball on Washington for he can't be stopped, they had seen it before in their own great leaders. In my opinion a stong faith in ones own destiny is an absolute quality required of great leadership. Flinching in the face of hostile extremists serves only to be disruptive and in fact impedes this necessary quality.
Got to go, have a 5k race in the morning!
It isn't your "logic" that makes you unpopular. It's your facts. (Although that doesn't always seem to be a handicap on these blogs.) If slaves couldn't live on their slave labor -- what the plantation owner allowed -- they couldn't just walk away and look for another job--as you imply. If they did try to leave, the armed "militia" of the plantation owner or of the local group of owners would quickly be behind them with rifles and dogs. If they were caught, things went quite badly for them; maybe they wouldn't be killed (because even if they lost a slave, they were teaching the others a lesson), but they would be whipped -- have you ever seen the photos of raised welts on the backs of slaves, male or female? They are ghastly, years later, and most probably never fully recovered. Or they might be buried up to their neck in sand and ants allowed to do their will. Ever wonder why--although you might not know this if you're young enough and you sound young--there were ALWAYS men and women who were so clearly of mixed race? It wasn't a romantic liaison, believe me. Owners could do anything they wanted to any of their pieces of property, including raping them. It was one way to replenish the slave inventory. And they easily and apparently without any guilt or sorrow broke up families, selling the husband to another plantation, for example, or maybe sending the children to several plantations. The families had no means of ever getting together again; they couldn't leave, obviously, and the plantations were usually too far apart, and anyway, we know they were like animals and didn't care if someone else "adopted" them.
Ever read Toni Morrison's masterpiece, "Beloved." I recommend it. It's fiction but the story is true. She won a Nobel prize for it and is rated one of America's (maybe the world's) top novelists (a poll of literary types a few years ago resulted in a tie between Morrison and F. Scott Fitzgerald as the greatest AMERICAN novelists of all time). Read it.
This was not, as bad as it is, the labor of immigrants who may not even be allowed a potty break or time for lunch and often live in squalid quarters and do stoop work you probably don't want to do.
Palindromedary ~ It is so true. Like in chess... you sacrifice a few Pawns to knock off a Queen, a Rook, a Knight, or a Bishop. You protect your Big Brass and King but you strategically use your tokens to advance your agenda. Bravo, Palindromedary, for pointing out those critical links in the chain of events.
By the way, this one deserves repeating. Palindromedary, this one is dedicated to you!
I agree with everything you said my friend. However this statement is not exactly true. No labor is completely free. Slave were not free, only cheap--much like immigration labor. The only difference is slaves cost a huge investment from the owner--a long term investment. In addition, the owner had to pay overseers to 'manage' the slave. The slave had to be provided with food, clothing, housing, and health care. The slave had no freedom or rights to 'quit' his job; but, had little worries about losing his job as well.
Undocumented workers have the right to 'quit'. However, they do not have food, housing, clothing, or health care provided either. Their compensation is hourly and so is the investment of the owner. They, like slaves, shared the same kind of work environment. The only difference is that if that environment hurts an undocumented worker in any way, the owner just looks for a replacement worker. Compensation ceases at the moment of injury. Slave owners did not enjoy that luxury. If a slave was injured, the owner lost an investment. Therefore slaves tended to enjoy a more reasonably safe work environment as a result.
An excellent metaphor for hourly workers vs slaves is rent-a-cars. Ask yourself this question, what am I going to take better care of, my own car that I bought, or a rent-a-car that I pay for hourly? If your answer is 'my own car' then congratulations--you prefer slavery.
I doubt this logic is going to go over well on this blog. It certainly has not made me the most popular guest at many of the parties I've attended. However, everyone must admit that this logic is at least provocative. Besides, popularity has never been one of my goals anyway. Truth is far more important than anything else.
I want to make it clear that I in no way want to go backwards to the time of slavery. That was a reprehensible affront to civil rights and human dignity. However, I feel I must point out that the current status quo of our society and every 'wage earner' in it, is but a sub-slave. Undocumented workers are in a state that is lower than low. Lower than a sub-slave. Dime for dime, undocumented workers are the cheapest form of labor ever had in this country. Even prison labor isn't as cheap.
When President Lincoln 'freed the slaves' he actually cut most of the benefits for slaves and introduced them to wage slavery.
I hate to get terribly off topic so maybe I should just watch TV tonight; BUT, why are we wasting time with immigration reform when legislation deregulating wall street is on the table, free trade is still being ignored, Sequester is threatening our social safety net, drug users are still in prison and war criminals are living in luxury, corporate money is still considered free speech, legislation for Campaign Finance reform is considered an ancient myth, severely mentally ill people are still roaming the streets and current legislation seeks to restrict gun sales to law abiding citizens? What about that incredible story about those poor women held prisoners for 10 years in some looser's basement?
But wait! Oh no, we have to devote the entire weekend blog to those pesky lettuce picking, salsa making, taco truck driving, house and yard cleaning, Home Depot loitering, highly skilled/low paid, Spanish speaking, cheap Mexican laborers who we hate so much for coming here and doing the dirty work we are too lazy to do for half the money that we wouldn't do it for anyway.
Why not just talk about the price of Clam Chowder in New England?
Pardon me for getting slightly off topic. Actually, this is as much on topic as I plan to be this weekend so scroll past me if you want from now on till Monday.
Republicans fought against immigration reform when George W. Bush served as president. They like the system the way it is, broken. Our broken system creates a two-tier workforce. The bottom tier of undocumented employees do not receive the protection of labor laws. Republican fund raisers tell their candidates that employers want to keep the two-tier unfair system, it allows employers to take advantage of immigrant labor. The United States had free labor until President Lincoln freed the slaves. Immediately we passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to get cheap, not free, but close to free labor from China. The Chinese Exclusion Act is a bit better than out and out slavery, but only by a little. Chinese were not allowed to own property, not allowed to marry, and women were prohibited from coming. At the conclusion of WWII we cancelled the Chinese Exclusion Act and started the Bracero Program that permitted Mexican unskilled workers to perform the lowest skilled employment. Now we have a system that serves no human goal. Our present system only serves employers who want to exploit unskilled laborers. We have nothing to be proud of when it comes to cheap labor. Republicans are merely serving their billionaire masters again.
What do we expect from the fascists sessions and cruz?
Mored -- I remembering them saying it was terrorist attack, but like you I wasn't paying that much attention.
House claim of impeachable offense in Benghazi is just memo to Hillary: Don't run or we'll do unto you as we did unto Bill and would like to do unto Barack. Also memo to Obama: No prosecution of Bush for real crimes or we'll impeach you just for being you. They are just about the politics of personal destruction because they have nothing to offer otherwise. Well, you know it didn't work with Bill Clinton, did it.
Attack on all fronts
Hopefully Obama will see the insanity of approving the Keystone pipeline, but Joe Biden states that he is in the minority in opposing the pipeline. So, just as teh Republicans added a "poison pill" (75 years of prefunded retirement benefits) in their attempt to kill the Post Office, we need to be creative in case the Obama administration approves this short-sighted, planet-killing pipeline!
Poison Pill for Keystone Pipeline?
Congress needs to pass a law that states any products derived from the tar-sands oil shipped through the keystone pipeline can only be sold in the United States. The refineries should not be allowed to export the gasoline refined from the tar sands. If we are going to put our aquafers in jepordy, and expose our citizens to the pollution, then that "bitumin" should be taxed as oil and, at the very least, the gasoline produced must be used to end our dependence on foreign oil!
Um, shouldn't that be 'Single-Payor now!'
A few years ago, I started calling them 'The Supreme Corp'
Being close to this issue myself I have to say I disagree with the view of the guests that the vast majority of the homeless have "some kind of mental illness" - unless you include such things as lacking education or marketable skills or having a criminal background or more common "personality disorders" (cantankerousness, lack of discipline, general difficulty in getting along with people, etc.) as categories of mental illness. Reagan did more than evict the mentally ill from hospitals - which he did, I think, to stigmatize the homeless which your guest, Gary Foster, apparently bought into (and which your other guest, Danny Harris, judging from his facial expression reacting to Foster's comment, seemed to disagree with - although he didn't seem to want to say so, practicing good organizational media discipline). Reagan's Vice President, George H.W. Bush, later, in his own presidential campaign, apparently exploited this saying that the homeless were "undereducated and crazy", implying to the zeitgeist of the "greed is good", "live and let die", poverty stigmatizing '80s that nobody should care what happened to them.
Reagan deregulated the housing industry, cut out subsidies for housing, and to what extent he contributed to the main cause of homelessness in the United States, deindustrialization. The disappearance of manufacturing not only took away living wage jobs for the unskilled but greatly accelerated the gentrification of cities as manufacturing, hitherto, had been the tax base for cities but, after manufacturing as gone, property taxes became the tax base for American cities. Thus, since Reagan, wages went down, housing costs skyrocketed, the social safety net dismantled, homelessness exploded. Not rocket science.
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GOP "whistle-blowers" condemn immigration, the poor, the aged, the sick the hungry and all of the huddled masses, the middle classes. It is so obnoxious, obstructionist, with death panels, war mongering, deficits are O.K., cut spending, but make more tanks, torture is O.K. don’t close Gitmo, and arrest and jail any black man that is smoking rope. Cheating on your wife is cool too especially on tax dollars. But Clinton did it without leaving the office. The next white house dress code is young black men wear their pants hangging off there ass, all girls wear short, short hot pants.
Get this Rush Limbaugh said for the Republicans to stop talking about Benghazi. Probably some body found out the other side of the of Limbaugh’s Golden Microphone is connected to Al Qaeda Libya via Citi corp. Had to say that though it was so funny, but seriously the Arabs have a huge influence in Fox news and money flowing in banks that are part of the radio station holding companies.
Romney and Prince Alwaleed's Kingdom likely share the same post office box number in the Cayman Islands. Next door the Bush Post office box. Hay buckaroo’s Alwaleed is suggesting to selling off his Hotel stuff. You who did you get that. Hope Penny Pritzker kicks his camels in the ass Chicago style. If she needs any help just send me an email.
While the Democratic Party trumpets Gabriel’s horn! It is convincing to be optimistic, plus being a certified political maniac my outlook is in favor of what Thom says especially a few weeks ago where the economy should tank. The stock market is wired and ready for the “Sting”. Chucky Todo of MSNBC made a cool millisecond comment about another high frequency trading spike that happened in the stock market.
Seriously, the stock market jumped thousands of points in the last couple of months. You who did you get that. The mainstream economic mercenaries did not say a word about it, I am missing something here. From 11,000 or so to 15,000 yahoo is a money miracle from my view. Ladies and gentleman of America something is happening. It might be a billionaire’s war going on.
This one is the coolest; these billionaires could be fighting to embrace the middle class boomers.