How are things in Memphis?
Yay for the people of Minneapolis, assuming the words Homan says have some connection to reality. But where are those withdrawn troops going? What other swing states are infested with the worst of the worst?
Don't know which thread to put this in, but I have just seen this in the Independent - the subheading says "Pullout from Minneapolis comes as Trump's approval ratings on immigration enforcement have thanked":
The Trump administration is ending the “surge” of thousands of immigration and law enforcement agents to Minnesota that sparked months of protests and led to the shooting deaths of two American citizens who were protesting the federal presence there. White House Border Czar Tom Homan told reporters in Minneapolis on Thursday that there has been a “big change” in state and local officials’ willingness to assist in providing some support for federal operations in the state and said there has been less of a need to deploy “quick reaction forces” to protect agents from protesters. “With that and [the] success that has been made arresting public safety threats and other priorities since this search operation began, as well as the unprecedented levels of coordination we have obtained from state officials and local law enforcement, I have proposed — and President Trump has concurred — that this surge operation conclude a significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue through the next week,” Homan said.
He added that “a small footprint of personnel” would remain in the area to supervise the transfer of “full command and control” of immigration enforcement in the state back to the ICE field office that has been in Minneapolis for decades. Homan also said he would remain in Minneapolis “for a little longer” to “oversee the drawdown of this operation” while stressing that the massive deployment of agents that had been dubbed “Operation Metro Surge” by administration officials was in fact “ending.”
The administration's decision to withdraw the thousands of agents whose roving patrols and aggressive tactics roiled Twin Cities streets in what appeared to be a deliberate effort to punish Minnesotans for having voted against President Donald Trump in the 2024, 2020 and 2016 elections comes weeks after the White House dispatched Homan there in the wake of the shooting death of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of a Border Patrol agent. Federal officials announced the deployment in early December, ostensibly to combat what the administration claimed was a wave of public benefits fraud by Somali immigrants after a viral video by a right-wing YouTube creator alleging that Minneapolis was filled with fake child care centers and medical businesses run by Somalis gained attention in conservative media circles. Administration officials say the months-long effort has led to more than 4,000 arrests of what they allege to be “dangerous criminal illegal aliens” but that number has also included numerous American citizens and people without criminal records.
The White House had justified the outsized presence and roving patrols as necessary because Minnesota does not allow state and local law enforcement to conduct civil immigration enforcement, though Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have maintained that ICE officers have always been permitted to take custody of people who are being released from jails and prisons at the end of a court-imposed sentence. At one recent White House press briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed there are “thousands” of “criminal illegal aliens” held in Minnesota facilities and being released back into the community without notifying federal officials. One Department of Homeland Security press release recent alleged that there were “more than 1,360 active detainers for criminals in Minnesota jails” as well.
But the administration’s claims and purported justifications have also been undermined by Minnesota officials who have pointed out that only as many as 380 non-citizens were being held in state prisons — and of those, only 270 were subject to “detainers” filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Minnesota Department of Corrections also said there are roughly 100 non-citizens with “detainers” filed against them in county and local jails as well. And while the administration has repeatedly claimed the aggressive operations in Minnesota were justified by the state government’s refusal to cooperate with federal enforcement efforts, Attorney General Pam Bondi further undermined those arguments last month when she sent a letter to state officials demanding access to the state’s voter database in exchange for removing agents from Minneapolis streets. President Donald Trump has in recent months repeatedly lied about his electoral history in the Gopher State by claiming to have won it three times even though he has never carried the state’s electoral votes and no Republican has done so since the 1972 presidential election. Walz had said earlier in the week that he expected the federal deployment to end in “days, not weeks and months” based on his own talks with administration officials, including Homan and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. And in the wake of Homan’s announcement, Walz said he was “cautiously optimistic” that the “surge of untrained, aggressive federal agents are going to leave Minnesota.”
What (to my knowledge) has not yet happened is the administration getting someone (a major politician of the opposition in particular) convicted in a court of law based on fake AI ‘evidence’.
What we have seen already, is court briefs where it turned out that the lawyer had used AI to draft the brief, but had not checked it over thoroughly. And so did not realize that a) in some of the cited precedent cases, the decision didn't actually say what the brief claimed, and b) some of the citations were entirely invented.
Several lawyers got badly burned; judges take a very dim view of lying to the court, which is what submitting a brief like that amounts to. As a result, most lawyers are likely to be extremely wary of trying to use AI for anything. Of course, lawyers around Trump have already demonstrated that they are not most lawyers, so it will be no surprise if one of them tries it. (Whether knowingly or just by failing to check some "evidence" provided by, for example, ICE.)
Getting a conviction, however, seems less likely. Already we see grand juries repeatedly refusing to indict** based on how unsubstantiated DOJ attorney's claims are. In court, any good defense attorney is going to have checked whether supposed evidence is real. Fingerprints on digital files, while not visible to the viewer, can be damning. It's possible to work around that, but it requires a level of competence not much in evidence in this administration.
** Heretofore, indictments were the next thing to automatic. When a grand jury declined to indict (and it only takes 12 out up to 23 jurors to do so), it was big news. Now, it seems about as newsworthy as some Trump administration spokesman spouting obvious lies.
People support Trump for reasons that have little to do with matters of fact in any social or economic or even political sense. It's tribal. They are on Team Trump.
I don't talk with Trump supporters about Trump. Or if and when I do, it's very brief, I just say that I think he's a crook and an asshole, and leave it at that. Oddly enough, they are also generally happy to leave it at that.
I have a friend who suggests talking with Trumpers about what motivates them, but without bringing Trump into it. For example, why is it necessary to deport people who have been here for decades. I haven't really tried that, but I guess it's an option.
The mason in the article has a valid complaint. People who live in southern border communities have valid complaints. People who were concerned about inflation had valid complaints. Whether they are looking in the right places for either causes or solutions is a different story, but the things they are unhappy with are not always unreasonable. They're just (IMO) looking at the wrong villains.
So, talking to the mason about undocumented labor and how that affects him could be useful. Etc.
But I really do think that Trump's base - the more or less 27-ish percent hard core - are basically unshakeable and there is nothing I'm gonna say or do that will move that.
If bad things happen to them, personally, or to someone in their family or close circle of friends, it could make a dent. Other than that, it ain't gonna happen.
Oddly, the nearest thing to really undermining his base support that I can think of was Trump et al saying that people shouldn't carry firearms to a protest. If there's one thing that might pry some of his base away, it's any hint of weakness around the 2nd A.
The paranoid style has always been a significant factor in the US. They aren't going away.
In early 20th century photographic evidence was challenged because photos were easy to fake. Arthur Conan Doyle famously fell for fake fairy photos (alliteration coincidental) and in turn used the argument in 'The Lost World' (where the claim that the dino photos were fake gets countered by presenting a living pterodactyl; movie adaptations tend to replace it with a T-Rex for effect).
I think we face a double danger: 1) people believing convincing fakes and 2) people not believing reality taking it for convincing fakes.
The 'filling the zone with <semisolid digestive final product>' is based on exactly that. They recognized that they can win by making people believe nothing is real anymore (just 'opinion') or making it near impossible to find the truth in a deluge of untruth (and meaningless garbage for further dilution). Some will believe anything said loud enough, few will seek the actual truth and a majority stops trying and turns away disgusted but passive. One can run the show with that mixture.
What (to my knowledge) has not yet happened is the administration getting someone (a major politician of the opposition in particular) convicted in a court of law based on fake AI 'evidence'. I believe that this is just a matter of time and would guess that it will first be tried on a (surviving) ICE victim by using AI doctored footage 'proving' that the victim tried to assault ICEistas with a deadly weapon first.
It comes down to this, social media is a communications technology that we are only just starting to adapt to. AI is another technology we will have to learn to use properly. Eventually, we will figure out how to use them without them being used abusively. The operative word being eventually.
Unfortunately, it will take us a while. Those of a historical bent might look at how our (great) great grandparents eventually dealt with "yellow journalism". Then, as now, a new technology for distributing information blossomed while distributing lots of misinformation. Over the course of decades, most (by now means all but most) people figured out that the tabloids were not reliable sources. Amusing, perhaps, but not reliable.
The challenge, once again, will be surviving while we figure out how the adjust and then roll out those adjustments across the population.
If you’ve ever done farm work (I have) you can certainly see why not. Not that it makes me sympathetic.
Makes me recall a now-humorous memory. One summer my father sent me to spend a week with one of his cousins who owned a family farm. What did I get from that week? A life-long determination to acquire skills that would let me work in a climate-controlled environment where I didn't have to lift heavy things. Or put my fingers in the near neighborhood of rotary machinery with blades and no safety cover.
These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
Combines, like cars, are computers on wheels. Or tracks. And almost autonimus. Though the custom cutters may not have cutting-edge equipment, their customers may not have digitized field layouts.
GA tried making it actually illegal to hire illegals, and it was a disaster.
Many years back now, the Colorado General Assembly was considering a bill, introduced by rural Republican members, that was basically a license for the sheriffs' departments in rural counties to hassle short brown ag workers. Once word got out, the eastern plains wheat farmers began getting calls from the custom cutters** saying they were just going to skip Colorado if the bill passed. Typically something like, "All my crews are legal, but I'm not going to put them at the mercy of your sheriff's asshole deputies." The bill died.
** Custom cutters are groups with one or more big combines and a bunch of trucks who harvest vast wheat fields when they're ripe. It's migratory work, starting in Texas and moving north as the summer progresses. Really erratic work. If it rains you can't harvest, and sometimes getting the job done in time means working by headlights all night long. Farmers, or even small groups of farmers, can't afford big combines. These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
morning all, fair point about the interviewee acknowledging the illegality of hiring, though instead of taking it out on those employers, he's happy for the government to take it out on the ones lowest on the payscale.
The Department of Homeland Security data undercuts a central, load-bearing mythdeployed by right-wing media and the Trump administration to justify its nationwide crackdown on immigrant communities — namely, claims that ICE and Border Patrol are going after the “worst of the worst.” In fact, nearly 40% of people in ICE custody have no violation other than a civil immigration infraction.
Another neat trick is justifying an intrusive and violent crackdown on immigration based on the purported criminality of immigrants while at the same time taking credit for declining crime rates - a decline that preceded the crackdown and was ongoing during the previous administration's "open border policy," during which all the rapists, murderers, human traffickers, and drug dealers were supposedly flooding into the country.
Gutting consumer protections, environmental regulations, and financial rules to benefit your billionaire donors while blaming the commoners' problems on poor immigrants is quite the trick. PT Barnum would be proud.
This is another one of those cases where it seems to me that our biggest problem is not one of immigration enforcement, but rather one of how we structure and regulate the economy and distribute the value generated by the work.
Thinking in terms of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economy schema, these sectors are unsustainable because they are violating the floor conditions of an economy built to protect both people and the environmental limits that we have to take care not to exceed. In this case it's the human side. Record profits should not be accompanied by declining standards of living for the majority of the population. If it is, then start questioning the model and working to rebalance things.
It's no wonder that so many other forms of justice are being eroded when economic injustice has been normalized as the proper functioning state of a capitalist economy.
GA tried making it actually illegal to hire illegals, and it was a disaster.
looking the other way might be the only way to keep construction and ag sectors afloat.
Which was obvious. But the folks in rural areas across the Midwest (and elsewhere, e.g. rural California) managed to avoid noticing that they were shooting themselves in the foot. Using a gun rest on the knee for better aim actually.
If you raise crops like vegetables, which need to be harvested by hand, how do you not realize that all your workers are speaking Spanish? If you're raising animals, how do you not know that pretty much all the workers in the slaughter houses are illegals?
But they managed. And now, they have crops rotting in the fields. And they can't sell their animals -- slaughter houses aren't going to buy animals when they have no workers to butcher them. Even if you aren't prosecuting the employers for hiring illegals, their businesses are getting trashed because they can't hire anyone else -- turns out that those folks complaining about "illegal immigrants taking our jobs!" aren't willing to do those jobs.** (Don't have the skills either, but that's a separate discussion.)
The construction industry doesn't have the same immediately-trash-the-economy-of-the-whole-community impact. The company owners are still in trouble because they can't get workers with the skills they need. But the impact on other businesses is, as a percentage, lower. Which only means they will take linger to be felt.
** If you've ever done farm work (I have) you can certainly see why not. Not that it makes me sympathetic.
That laser focus on the ‘illegality’ of brown folks doing the back breaking labor but total inability to consider that the people who are hiring them are doing something illegal is amazing to me.
In fairness to the interviewee, I took this to be referring to the people doing the hiring, not the workers.
And I couldn’t hire an illegal alien. It just didn’t seem right. And it’s illegal, by the way, but people are getting away with it.
Adding to what cleek is saying: I think the chaos is causing them pain, but they are convinced that the people being targeted by Trump's cruelty deserve that pain, and they are more committed to seeing that pain subjected than they are to avoiding their own suffering in the process. They believe that they will be restored in the aftermath, and they get to witness the righteous retribution in the mean time as consolation for their own pain.
Well, a couple of straws in the wind indicating that, while we probably won't catch up with you UK folks real soon, we may at least start moving in the right direction.
Today both CNN and the New York Times have multiple front page articles on the Epstein saga. I'd like to think they've decided there's blood in the water and (to horribly mix the metaphor) they don't want to miss the boat. I'd like to think that we're close to shifting from "slowly" to "and then all at once" -- or at least an approximation of the latter.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Aiken formula”
This first thing I thought of when they announced the withdrawal as a victory was W's "Mission Accomplished" banner on the aircraft carrier.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice ... um, well ... don't get fooled again!
"
How are things in Memphis?
Yay for the people of Minneapolis, assuming the words Homan says have some connection to reality. But where are those withdrawn troops going? What other swing states are infested with the worst of the worst?
On “What fresh hell is this?”
Don't know which thread to put this in, but I have just seen this in the Independent - the subheading says "Pullout from Minneapolis comes as Trump's approval ratings on immigration enforcement have thanked":
The Trump administration is ending the “surge” of thousands of immigration and law enforcement agents to Minnesota that sparked months of protests and led to the shooting deaths of two American citizens who were protesting the federal presence there.
White House Border Czar Tom Homan told reporters in Minneapolis on Thursday that there has been a “big change” in state and local officials’ willingness to assist in providing some support for federal operations in the state and said there has been less of a need to deploy “quick reaction forces” to protect agents from protesters.
“With that and [the] success that has been made arresting public safety threats and other priorities since this search operation began, as well as the unprecedented levels of coordination we have obtained from state officials and local law enforcement, I have proposed — and President Trump has concurred — that this surge operation conclude a significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue through the next week,” Homan said.
He added that “a small footprint of personnel” would remain in the area to supervise the transfer of “full command and control” of immigration enforcement in the state back to the ICE field office that has been in Minneapolis for decades.
Homan also said he would remain in Minneapolis “for a little longer” to “oversee the drawdown of this operation” while stressing that the massive deployment of agents that had been dubbed “Operation Metro Surge” by administration officials was in fact “ending.”
The administration's decision to withdraw the thousands of agents whose roving patrols and aggressive tactics roiled Twin Cities streets in what appeared to be a deliberate effort to punish Minnesotans for having voted against President Donald Trump in the 2024, 2020 and 2016 elections comes weeks after the White House dispatched Homan there in the wake of the shooting death of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of a Border Patrol agent.
Federal officials announced the deployment in early December, ostensibly to combat what the administration claimed was a wave of public benefits fraud by Somali immigrants after a viral video by a right-wing YouTube creator alleging that Minneapolis was filled with fake child care centers and medical businesses run by Somalis gained attention in conservative media circles.
Administration officials say the months-long effort has led to more than 4,000 arrests of what they allege to be “dangerous criminal illegal aliens” but that number has also included numerous American citizens and people without criminal records.
The White House had justified the outsized presence and roving patrols as necessary because Minnesota does not allow state and local law enforcement to conduct civil immigration enforcement, though Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have maintained that ICE officers have always been permitted to take custody of people who are being released from jails and prisons at the end of a court-imposed sentence.
At one recent White House press briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed there are “thousands” of “criminal illegal aliens” held in Minnesota facilities and being released back into the community without notifying federal officials. One Department of Homeland Security press release recent alleged that there were “more than 1,360 active detainers for criminals in Minnesota jails” as well.
But the administration’s claims and purported justifications have also been undermined by Minnesota officials who have pointed out that only as many as 380 non-citizens were being held in state prisons — and of those, only 270 were subject to “detainers” filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Minnesota Department of Corrections also said there are roughly 100 non-citizens with “detainers” filed against them in county and local jails as well.
And while the administration has repeatedly claimed the aggressive operations in Minnesota were justified by the state government’s refusal to cooperate with federal enforcement efforts, Attorney General Pam Bondi further undermined those arguments last month when she sent a letter to state officials demanding access to the state’s voter database in exchange for removing agents from Minneapolis streets.
President Donald Trump has in recent months repeatedly lied about his electoral history in the Gopher State by claiming to have won it three times even though he has never carried the state’s electoral votes and no Republican has done so since the 1972 presidential election.
Walz had said earlier in the week that he expected the federal deployment to end in “days, not weeks and months” based on his own talks with administration officials, including Homan and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
And in the wake of Homan’s announcement, Walz said he was “cautiously optimistic” that the “surge of untrained, aggressive federal agents are going to leave Minnesota.”
"
What we have seen already, is court briefs where it turned out that the lawyer had used AI to draft the brief, but had not checked it over thoroughly. And so did not realize that a) in some of the cited precedent cases, the decision didn't actually say what the brief claimed, and b) some of the citations were entirely invented.
Several lawyers got badly burned; judges take a very dim view of lying to the court, which is what submitting a brief like that amounts to. As a result, most lawyers are likely to be extremely wary of trying to use AI for anything. Of course, lawyers around Trump have already demonstrated that they are not most lawyers, so it will be no surprise if one of them tries it. (Whether knowingly or just by failing to check some "evidence" provided by, for example, ICE.)
Getting a conviction, however, seems less likely. Already we see grand juries repeatedly refusing to indict** based on how unsubstantiated DOJ attorney's claims are. In court, any good defense attorney is going to have checked whether supposed evidence is real. Fingerprints on digital files, while not visible to the viewer, can be damning. It's possible to work around that, but it requires a level of competence not much in evidence in this administration.
** Heretofore, indictments were the next thing to automatic. When a grand jury declined to indict (and it only takes 12 out up to 23 jurors to do so), it was big news. Now, it seems about as newsworthy as some Trump administration spokesman spouting obvious lies.
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
People support Trump for reasons that have little to do with matters of fact in any social or economic or even political sense. It's tribal. They are on Team Trump.
I don't talk with Trump supporters about Trump. Or if and when I do, it's very brief, I just say that I think he's a crook and an asshole, and leave it at that. Oddly enough, they are also generally happy to leave it at that.
I have a friend who suggests talking with Trumpers about what motivates them, but without bringing Trump into it. For example, why is it necessary to deport people who have been here for decades. I haven't really tried that, but I guess it's an option.
The mason in the article has a valid complaint. People who live in southern border communities have valid complaints. People who were concerned about inflation had valid complaints. Whether they are looking in the right places for either causes or solutions is a different story, but the things they are unhappy with are not always unreasonable. They're just (IMO) looking at the wrong villains.
So, talking to the mason about undocumented labor and how that affects him could be useful. Etc.
But I really do think that Trump's base - the more or less 27-ish percent hard core - are basically unshakeable and there is nothing I'm gonna say or do that will move that.
If bad things happen to them, personally, or to someone in their family or close circle of friends, it could make a dent. Other than that, it ain't gonna happen.
Oddly, the nearest thing to really undermining his base support that I can think of was Trump et al saying that people shouldn't carry firearms to a protest. If there's one thing that might pry some of his base away, it's any hint of weakness around the 2nd A.
The paranoid style has always been a significant factor in the US. They aren't going away.
On “What fresh hell is this?”
In early 20th century photographic evidence was challenged because photos were easy to fake. Arthur Conan Doyle famously fell for fake fairy photos (alliteration coincidental) and in turn used the argument in 'The Lost World' (where the claim that the dino photos were fake gets countered by presenting a living pterodactyl; movie adaptations tend to replace it with a T-Rex for effect).
I think we face a double danger: 1) people believing convincing fakes and 2) people not believing reality taking it for convincing fakes.
The 'filling the zone with <semisolid digestive final product>' is based on exactly that. They recognized that they can win by making people believe nothing is real anymore (just 'opinion') or making it near impossible to find the truth in a deluge of untruth (and meaningless garbage for further dilution). Some will believe anything said loud enough, few will seek the actual truth and a majority stops trying and turns away disgusted but passive. One can run the show with that mixture.
What (to my knowledge) has not yet happened is the administration getting someone (a major politician of the opposition in particular) convicted in a court of law based on fake AI 'evidence'. I believe that this is just a matter of time and would guess that it will first be tried on a (surviving) ICE victim by using AI doctored footage 'proving' that the victim tried to assault ICEistas with a deadly weapon first.
"
It comes down to this, social media is a communications technology that we are only just starting to adapt to. AI is another technology we will have to learn to use properly. Eventually, we will figure out how to use them without them being used abusively. The operative word being eventually.
Unfortunately, it will take us a while. Those of a historical bent might look at how our (great) great grandparents eventually dealt with "yellow journalism". Then, as now, a new technology for distributing information blossomed while distributing lots of misinformation. Over the course of decades, most (by now means all but most) people figured out that the tabloids were not reliable sources. Amusing, perhaps, but not reliable.
The challenge, once again, will be surviving while we figure out how the adjust and then roll out those adjustments across the population.
"
AI video is going to destroy civilization.
i'm 80% serious about that.
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
One thing about doing farm work. Nothing else you will ever do qualifies as "hard work."
"
If you’ve ever done farm work (I have) you can certainly see why not. Not that it makes me sympathetic.
Makes me recall a now-humorous memory. One summer my father sent me to spend a week with one of his cousins who owned a family farm. What did I get from that week? A life-long determination to acquire skills that would let me work in a climate-controlled environment where I didn't have to lift heavy things. Or put my fingers in the near neighborhood of rotary machinery with blades and no safety cover.
"
These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
Combines, like cars, are computers on wheels. Or tracks. And almost autonimus. Though the custom cutters may not have cutting-edge equipment, their customers may not have digitized field layouts.
"
GA tried making it actually illegal to hire illegals, and it was a disaster.
Many years back now, the Colorado General Assembly was considering a bill, introduced by rural Republican members, that was basically a license for the sheriffs' departments in rural counties to hassle short brown ag workers. Once word got out, the eastern plains wheat farmers began getting calls from the custom cutters** saying they were just going to skip Colorado if the bill passed. Typically something like, "All my crews are legal, but I'm not going to put them at the mercy of your sheriff's asshole deputies." The bill died.
** Custom cutters are groups with one or more big combines and a bunch of trucks who harvest vast wheat fields when they're ripe. It's migratory work, starting in Texas and moving north as the summer progresses. Really erratic work. If it rains you can't harvest, and sometimes getting the job done in time means working by headlights all night long. Farmers, or even small groups of farmers, can't afford big combines. These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
"
morning all, fair point about the interviewee acknowledging the illegality of hiring, though instead of taking it out on those employers, he's happy for the government to take it out on the ones lowest on the payscale.
"
loved this phrase:
"
environmental regulations?
Republicans are on it !
"
Another neat trick is justifying an intrusive and violent crackdown on immigration based on the purported criminality of immigrants while at the same time taking credit for declining crime rates - a decline that preceded the crackdown and was ongoing during the previous administration's "open border policy," during which all the rapists, murderers, human traffickers, and drug dealers were supposedly flooding into the country.
"
Gutting consumer protections, environmental regulations, and financial rules to benefit your billionaire donors while blaming the commoners' problems on poor immigrants is quite the trick. PT Barnum would be proud.
On “What fresh hell is this?”
The vast resources of the world's most powerful nation (just ask them!) devoted to crafting ever more persuasive lies.
Orwell would be amazed.
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
This is another one of those cases where it seems to me that our biggest problem is not one of immigration enforcement, but rather one of how we structure and regulate the economy and distribute the value generated by the work.
Thinking in terms of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economy schema, these sectors are unsustainable because they are violating the floor conditions of an economy built to protect both people and the environmental limits that we have to take care not to exceed. In this case it's the human side. Record profits should not be accompanied by declining standards of living for the majority of the population. If it is, then start questioning the model and working to rebalance things.
It's no wonder that so many other forms of justice are being eroded when economic injustice has been normalized as the proper functioning state of a capitalist economy.
"
Which was obvious. But the folks in rural areas across the Midwest (and elsewhere, e.g. rural California) managed to avoid noticing that they were shooting themselves in the foot. Using a gun rest on the knee for better aim actually.
If you raise crops like vegetables, which need to be harvested by hand, how do you not realize that all your workers are speaking Spanish? If you're raising animals, how do you not know that pretty much all the workers in the slaughter houses are illegals?
But they managed. And now, they have crops rotting in the fields. And they can't sell their animals -- slaughter houses aren't going to buy animals when they have no workers to butcher them. Even if you aren't prosecuting the employers for hiring illegals, their businesses are getting trashed because they can't hire anyone else -- turns out that those folks complaining about "illegal immigrants taking our jobs!" aren't willing to do those jobs.** (Don't have the skills either, but that's a separate discussion.)
The construction industry doesn't have the same immediately-trash-the-economy-of-the-whole-community impact. The company owners are still in trouble because they can't get workers with the skills they need. But the impact on other businesses is, as a percentage, lower. Which only means they will take linger to be felt.
** If you've ever done farm work (I have) you can certainly see why not. Not that it makes me sympathetic.
"
hsh beat me to it! That's what I understood it to mean too.
On bamboozled, I always thought it meant thoroughly confused, but I see that both meanings are possible. You live and learn.
"
GA tried making it actually illegal to hire illegals, and it was a disaster.
looking the other way might be the only way to keep construction and ag sectors afloat.
"
lj:
In fairness to the interviewee, I took this to be referring to the people doing the hiring, not the workers.
And I couldn’t hire an illegal alien. It just didn’t seem right. And it’s illegal, by the way, but people are getting away with it.
On “Separated by a common language”
Adding to what cleek is saying: I think the chaos is causing them pain, but they are convinced that the people being targeted by Trump's cruelty deserve that pain, and they are more committed to seeing that pain subjected than they are to avoiding their own suffering in the process. They believe that they will be restored in the aftermath, and they get to witness the righteous retribution in the mean time as consolation for their own pain.
"
Well, a couple of straws in the wind indicating that, while we probably won't catch up with you UK folks real soon, we may at least start moving in the right direction.
Today both CNN and the New York Times have multiple front page articles on the Epstein saga. I'd like to think they've decided there's blood in the water and (to horribly mix the metaphor) they don't want to miss the boat. I'd like to think that we're close to shifting from "slowly" to "and then all at once" -- or at least an approximation of the latter.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.