Bracing and right on the money. I was so encouraged by your subtle potrayal of all the interlocking mechanisms of selfishness, greed and racism that have let us down a path to the unthinkable. That we've surrendered our national ideals to a cadre of Nazi-adjacent moral degenerates and short-sighted scumbags and it will take some doing to claw them back and establish reforms in our legal system, the elimination of legal loopholes, and the establishment of much better mechanisms of restraining and punishing the while collar criminals at the top of the heap. Kudos.
Totally agree. However, think back over the past 70 years or so and try to identify a single president in either party who actively pursued the reform goals you mentioned. Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren are about the only people I can think of who would have eagerly addressed such changes in our rigged government that favors the rich and tosses the poor into the ditch. The Democratic Party ensured they would not be able to run, just like they tossed young David Hogg out of the DNC.
My quality of life has barely changed over the past 79 years. I was raised in a tiny house smack dab in the 50th percentile - the middle class. My parents both worked and retired to an 1800 sqft house in Florida where they lived happilyeverafter. What has changed in my life is that I am still middle class, but now I am in the top 2nd percentile incomewise. Just like in the 1950's, I am still light-years away from being "rich". The only notable change in my life is that I no longer have to work my ass off to enjoy the same quality of life as my late parents. At 65, I too quit working and became a capitalist - no longer dependent on a paycheck - and I too am enjoying happilyeverafter in a nice house in Florida. My point is that nothing has appreciably changed over the past 80 years except that you have to have a much higher income to live the middle-class life. The wealth curve has obscenely skyrocketed into the stratosphere, leaving most Americans on planet Hopeful.
It might be a useful thought experiment to consider the degenerate forces currently (and, sad to say historically) at play as a moral disease process similar to cancer, diabetes, dementia or any other endemic disease that progresses over time into something that will put you six feet under. Burgeoning at first with few or any symptoms, but gradually draining the life out of you. While such diseases begin at a level of involvement that's highly localized, and as I said, hard to detect, as they progress they invade, damage and otherwise interfere with the proper functioning of more and more anatomical systems. When enough symptoms appear that diagnosis becomes necessary it is often so late in the game that treatment itself can be toxic, as well as a toss-up between life and death. IMO we are far down the road of this allegorical or metaphorical process. So far that it's become difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys, or even to see what's happening behind the scenes, who's pulling the strings, etc. But we have to keep probing and keep targeting what we can discover or all is lost. I refuse to believe that and I will, to my dying day, keep fighting to excise the degenerative factors in our culture and society, AS WELL AS THEIR ECHOES IN MY OWN CHARACTER AND THINKING. So be it.
Your article states "Illegal Immigrants". With all due respect, the immigrants are undocumented and repeating the divisive label created the Trump, Stephen Miller et all is like playing into their hands.
America’s immigration policy follows capitalism’s sacred rule: punish the desperate, protect the profitable. The worker gets zip-tied in front of his children while the CEO who hired him gets a tax deduction and a golf invitation. Apparently, personal responsibility becomes a mysterious theological concept once the person owns a poultry plant. If illegal labor is the sin, stop crucifying the hands that work and start arresting the men collecting thirty pieces of silver from them.
I am surprised to find we actually have a law on the books that would punish employers for attracting and enslaving foreign-born workers. But of course it is not enforced, because of the paramount importance of "free enterprise" to exploit for profit. Our government needs to reclaim its constitutionally authorized right to govern, which has been gradually drained away by corporations and the super-rich.
Yeah, I would like to see the illegal immigration problem solved, but there are too few American citizens or legal immigrants who are willing (for the low wages they receive) to to do the menial, dangerous, unhealthful work necessary to give the American consumers what they want. Many employers would be out of business if they had to provide higher wages and better working conditions. So it's a Catch 22 situation, where we need the workers, but we also need the employers. Most of the corporate employers, however, are so big and wealthy that they could now provide these benefits to their workers, and they should be forced to pay up.
A very sensible approach, though it runs into a problem that I see throughout our society. Basically it seems that Americans are far better at dealing with effects than causes. By and large we just don't plan well, or see the big picture if it calls for expenditures that don't lead to immediate profits (except in “fighting” the effects).
Thus the drug "problem" is often treated as a policing issue rather than asking what in our society leads to people abusing substances, or gun proliferation is "controlled" with those damn metal detectors instead of asking what drives people nuts or how the Second Amendment should be properly interpreted, and water shortages are not publicly tied into climate change. And so on and so on we do this through many of the social and physical problems in this country.
You can see this narrow thinking in healthcare, with more treatment of, say, heart disease than stepping back and looking at what makes them sick in the first place. For that matter the same lack of vision exists with international affairs, such as not really asking why terrorism occurs or what drives people to migrate. Until and unless we have citizens, politicians and a media with the knowledge and courage to ask such questions we'll always be playing catch-up while papering over the holes.
Corporations have TWO severe problems for all of us. One is being treated as human citizens. The other is acting as armor to protect the real criminals making the policies and decisions. The former we might reform. The second,requires a completely new legal definition of incorporation.
I remember E-verify. That might have helped had it been implemented in full. I sort of remember it being tried for a few years at the most then talk of it disappeared. A totally mechanized agricultural industry might help, not the same as AI. Is that practical? Or are we past what is practical and into the drastic and dramatic and just can't face it. We're also running out of water in California. No water, no crops, no jobs, no undocumented workers.
“…every time anybody tries to solve that problem the business lobby jumps in and kills it.” American capitalism demands that inconveniences such as ethics and integrity take a back seat to profit, because that’s WJWD.
Thanks for this post. I had mistakenly thought Regan had sided with Big Ag in California on this. Providing this history helps us when we're talking to people about the immigration issue. I have found that when people hear that employers used to be subject to prosecution, the logic is inescapable. People realize the current system of going after the workers, not the employers is just designed to exploit people, keep them from unionizing or speaking up about conditions and keep the rest of us from seeing the real issue. It's the employers and big business that benefit from our current broken system. It has worked for them until the current Trump regime, whose extreme measures will disrupt some employers' business operations too.
This has always been the right and moral thing to do. Which is why the morbidly rich and MAGA so violently oppose it. Remember our SCOTUS--money is speech, corporations are persons. The rest of us can basically go eat $&*t. I am so tired of that. And of the insecure ICE thugs--and let's not hid this, a lot of them are black and brown too, who get their jollies out of sadism. I'd love to see them in someplace like Attica, though it will never happen until we rise up, take MAGA down, suppress the deplorables, and make the morbidly rich howl. Not expecting any of that anytime soon. November will be sabotaged. "Bank" on that.
Cheeto’s Morality And Fascist Republicans Govern America And World
In a disgusting display of arrogance and lawlessness Cheeto declared that the only thing now that can stop him is his own morality!!( bit.ly/4r5RS15)/
“A lot of times, you can’t convince a voter,” he said at another time. “You have to just do what’s right. And then a lot of the things I did were not really politically popular. They turned out to be when it worked out so well.”
Let that sink in for a moment. This demented depraved malignant narcissist just said the quiet dictator speak out loud. No laws constrain him or his regime, No domestic or international norms can check his decision making. No advisors or country’s opinions will make any difference as to what he will do.
Yes. How he views the world and his own immoral depravity will decide how he will proceed,
This is the culmination of years of a depraved fascist political party and a psychotic mind’s development that is now so demented that it leverages the free domestic and world order. Time to protest like never before and call your Congress people to obstruct him in every way possible. It may take a midterm election to get him impeached. And join Indivisible to consolidate your voice against immorality.
This is where the whole “free market” sermon gets funny. Apparently markets are sacred right up until a billionaire needs your water, your electric grid, a tax break, and permission to park diesel generators next to your house. Then suddenly socialism is fantastic, provided the socialism flows upward. Build the AI centers if they make sense. Just stop asking ordinary people to subsidize the infrastructure, pollution, and risk while somebody else keeps the profit.
Bracing and right on the money. I was so encouraged by your subtle potrayal of all the interlocking mechanisms of selfishness, greed and racism that have let us down a path to the unthinkable. That we've surrendered our national ideals to a cadre of Nazi-adjacent moral degenerates and short-sighted scumbags and it will take some doing to claw them back and establish reforms in our legal system, the elimination of legal loopholes, and the establishment of much better mechanisms of restraining and punishing the while collar criminals at the top of the heap. Kudos.
Totally agree. However, think back over the past 70 years or so and try to identify a single president in either party who actively pursued the reform goals you mentioned. Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren are about the only people I can think of who would have eagerly addressed such changes in our rigged government that favors the rich and tosses the poor into the ditch. The Democratic Party ensured they would not be able to run, just like they tossed young David Hogg out of the DNC.
My quality of life has barely changed over the past 79 years. I was raised in a tiny house smack dab in the 50th percentile - the middle class. My parents both worked and retired to an 1800 sqft house in Florida where they lived happilyeverafter. What has changed in my life is that I am still middle class, but now I am in the top 2nd percentile incomewise. Just like in the 1950's, I am still light-years away from being "rich". The only notable change in my life is that I no longer have to work my ass off to enjoy the same quality of life as my late parents. At 65, I too quit working and became a capitalist - no longer dependent on a paycheck - and I too am enjoying happilyeverafter in a nice house in Florida. My point is that nothing has appreciably changed over the past 80 years except that you have to have a much higher income to live the middle-class life. The wealth curve has obscenely skyrocketed into the stratosphere, leaving most Americans on planet Hopeful.
It might be a useful thought experiment to consider the degenerate forces currently (and, sad to say historically) at play as a moral disease process similar to cancer, diabetes, dementia or any other endemic disease that progresses over time into something that will put you six feet under. Burgeoning at first with few or any symptoms, but gradually draining the life out of you. While such diseases begin at a level of involvement that's highly localized, and as I said, hard to detect, as they progress they invade, damage and otherwise interfere with the proper functioning of more and more anatomical systems. When enough symptoms appear that diagnosis becomes necessary it is often so late in the game that treatment itself can be toxic, as well as a toss-up between life and death. IMO we are far down the road of this allegorical or metaphorical process. So far that it's become difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys, or even to see what's happening behind the scenes, who's pulling the strings, etc. But we have to keep probing and keep targeting what we can discover or all is lost. I refuse to believe that and I will, to my dying day, keep fighting to excise the degenerative factors in our culture and society, AS WELL AS THEIR ECHOES IN MY OWN CHARACTER AND THINKING. So be it.
Your article states "Illegal Immigrants". With all due respect, the immigrants are undocumented and repeating the divisive label created the Trump, Stephen Miller et all is like playing into their hands.
America’s immigration policy follows capitalism’s sacred rule: punish the desperate, protect the profitable. The worker gets zip-tied in front of his children while the CEO who hired him gets a tax deduction and a golf invitation. Apparently, personal responsibility becomes a mysterious theological concept once the person owns a poultry plant. If illegal labor is the sin, stop crucifying the hands that work and start arresting the men collecting thirty pieces of silver from them.
I am surprised to find we actually have a law on the books that would punish employers for attracting and enslaving foreign-born workers. But of course it is not enforced, because of the paramount importance of "free enterprise" to exploit for profit. Our government needs to reclaim its constitutionally authorized right to govern, which has been gradually drained away by corporations and the super-rich.
Yeah, I would like to see the illegal immigration problem solved, but there are too few American citizens or legal immigrants who are willing (for the low wages they receive) to to do the menial, dangerous, unhealthful work necessary to give the American consumers what they want. Many employers would be out of business if they had to provide higher wages and better working conditions. So it's a Catch 22 situation, where we need the workers, but we also need the employers. Most of the corporate employers, however, are so big and wealthy that they could now provide these benefits to their workers, and they should be forced to pay up.
A very sensible approach, though it runs into a problem that I see throughout our society. Basically it seems that Americans are far better at dealing with effects than causes. By and large we just don't plan well, or see the big picture if it calls for expenditures that don't lead to immediate profits (except in “fighting” the effects).
Thus the drug "problem" is often treated as a policing issue rather than asking what in our society leads to people abusing substances, or gun proliferation is "controlled" with those damn metal detectors instead of asking what drives people nuts or how the Second Amendment should be properly interpreted, and water shortages are not publicly tied into climate change. And so on and so on we do this through many of the social and physical problems in this country.
You can see this narrow thinking in healthcare, with more treatment of, say, heart disease than stepping back and looking at what makes them sick in the first place. For that matter the same lack of vision exists with international affairs, such as not really asking why terrorism occurs or what drives people to migrate. Until and unless we have citizens, politicians and a media with the knowledge and courage to ask such questions we'll always be playing catch-up while papering over the holes.
Corporations have TWO severe problems for all of us. One is being treated as human citizens. The other is acting as armor to protect the real criminals making the policies and decisions. The former we might reform. The second,requires a completely new legal definition of incorporation.
I finally understand why Romney lost - he pissed off the billionaires backers of the GOP.
I remember E-verify. That might have helped had it been implemented in full. I sort of remember it being tried for a few years at the most then talk of it disappeared. A totally mechanized agricultural industry might help, not the same as AI. Is that practical? Or are we past what is practical and into the drastic and dramatic and just can't face it. We're also running out of water in California. No water, no crops, no jobs, no undocumented workers.
I, too, remember E-Verify and was wondering what happened to that! Thanks for bringing it up! It was being used in AZ.
“…every time anybody tries to solve that problem the business lobby jumps in and kills it.” American capitalism demands that inconveniences such as ethics and integrity take a back seat to profit, because that’s WJWD.
Thanks for this post. I had mistakenly thought Regan had sided with Big Ag in California on this. Providing this history helps us when we're talking to people about the immigration issue. I have found that when people hear that employers used to be subject to prosecution, the logic is inescapable. People realize the current system of going after the workers, not the employers is just designed to exploit people, keep them from unionizing or speaking up about conditions and keep the rest of us from seeing the real issue. It's the employers and big business that benefit from our current broken system. It has worked for them until the current Trump regime, whose extreme measures will disrupt some employers' business operations too.
This has always been the right and moral thing to do. Which is why the morbidly rich and MAGA so violently oppose it. Remember our SCOTUS--money is speech, corporations are persons. The rest of us can basically go eat $&*t. I am so tired of that. And of the insecure ICE thugs--and let's not hid this, a lot of them are black and brown too, who get their jollies out of sadism. I'd love to see them in someplace like Attica, though it will never happen until we rise up, take MAGA down, suppress the deplorables, and make the morbidly rich howl. Not expecting any of that anytime soon. November will be sabotaged. "Bank" on that.
If you want a Plantation Economy, you will need wage slaves.
If you chuck out the Brown ones, then . . .
[It will be hard for majorities to admit that their Comp or Poli Sci BS/BA degree entitles them to pick strawberries and sh*t-lettuce, etc.
#VOTE for America
#DEPORT Krasnov, the spy, to join his benefactor, Putie Pie
#DRAIN all Witkoff and Kushner accounts
Cheeto’s Morality And Fascist Republicans Govern America And World
In a disgusting display of arrogance and lawlessness Cheeto declared that the only thing now that can stop him is his own morality!!( bit.ly/4r5RS15)/
“A lot of times, you can’t convince a voter,” he said at another time. “You have to just do what’s right. And then a lot of the things I did were not really politically popular. They turned out to be when it worked out so well.”
Let that sink in for a moment. This demented depraved malignant narcissist just said the quiet dictator speak out loud. No laws constrain him or his regime, No domestic or international norms can check his decision making. No advisors or country’s opinions will make any difference as to what he will do.
Yes. How he views the world and his own immoral depravity will decide how he will proceed,
This is the culmination of years of a depraved fascist political party and a psychotic mind’s development that is now so demented that it leverages the free domestic and world order. Time to protest like never before and call your Congress people to obstruct him in every way possible. It may take a midterm election to get him impeached. And join Indivisible to consolidate your voice against immorality.
Miller is not a white supremist. He looks like a foreigner to me. Deport him.
Charles,I really don't think deportation is the answer. There should be something slightly more unpleasant for this " Nazi".
Excellent!!
This is where the whole “free market” sermon gets funny. Apparently markets are sacred right up until a billionaire needs your water, your electric grid, a tax break, and permission to park diesel generators next to your house. Then suddenly socialism is fantastic, provided the socialism flows upward. Build the AI centers if they make sense. Just stop asking ordinary people to subsidize the infrastructure, pollution, and risk while somebody else keeps the profit.