Tag Archives: immigration

Political Rants

State of it, 2019.

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.

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.

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