Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/02/sibley-california.html
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It’s almost like they’re a bunch of unprincipled, dishonest a-holes, all of them. Why did nobody tell me?
/s
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Sounds like a great place for a crowd sourced corn maze.
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They’re slowly migrating the farm to Russia, except they’re stupid enough that they’re going the long way round.
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Is this the stupid fact that Trump is holding over Nunes head to keep him on a tight leash?
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I read that article and it was so frickin weird. I got such severe cognitive dissonance
Everyone here loves the immigrants who are working their dairies. they think of them as family. Also, a lot of them voted for Trump and support his immigration policies which, if actually enforced, would utterly destroy their dairy businesses and wreck the lives of the immigrant people who they seem to genuinely like
WTAF???
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Living near a lot of farms. In a place with a lot of illegal immigrants. And having spent a lot of time in the restaurant business where Hispanic immigrants are basically the entire back of house work force.
This is true.
But what’s also true is an awful lot of those same people are rabid, rabid, rabid Trump folks. And half a beer in they’ll go off about immigrants destroying America.
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I know - all those “we love Trump but not his immigration policies” quotes from farmers had me scratching my head. What else was candidate Trump but the “Mexicans are bad, keep them out of the country” guy?
I guess this is it - they’re against Trump’s immigration policy only so much as it would effect them, but they’re for it in general. He appealed to their racism, even if the non-whites they know are the special exceptions, the “good ones” that are necessary.
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In many ways Sibley is the model for the true GOP vision of the Heartland: a small town whose local government and media are dominated by corporations and a handful of wealthy residents, with white residents being served by precariously employed and vulnerable darker-skinned people who are appropriately docile.
The paranoid surveillance of outsiders enabled by technology is a new twist, but I’ll bet the old twist of a lot of Xtianists is present in this horrible place as well. No wonder Nunes moved the operation there.
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Also a lot of them assume that because they support trump, his hurtful policies will only be enforced targeting the god damn liberals in the city. And to an extent they are right. He has repeatedly shown that he has no principles and no care for the law, he only wants to use his power to hurt people who don’t like him.
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I’ve watched people tell those undocumented immigrants they consider family how awful illegal immmigrants are to their faces. Its less a “the good ones” than a failure to connect the humans they know to the political slogans.
You point out the contraditions and you get excuses and dodges. These jobs used to be done by teenagers. But millenials just dont want to work.
Neither of which is true.
(and teens aren’t millenials).
So they have to hire illegals. I called a boss out on it once. Pointed out that his parents were immegrants that got their start in the restaurant business in the 40’s, and he followed them into it in the 60’s. His farmer friends are all sons and grandsons of polish immegrants who started out as farm hands and eventually married into landed families after a generation or two. And so forth.
I got a 45 minute screed about how the minimum wage only exists to let kids get a start on their first job so of course its not a living wage. And America is an explicitly Christian nation and half the Constitution is bible quotes.
Theres definitely a nasty revenge element to it. A beer buyer told me earlier today. “Man the Democrats are really sticking it to Trump. But look at the slut Clinton got caught with. Waaaay worse looking than the skank Trump was with. And you know what that means? Trump is just a classier guy than Clinton.”
This was his reaction to a news story abiut Kavannaugh and all the witness trying to contradict his testimony.
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He’s also the “women are property without agency that anyone should be able to molest with impunity” guy.
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None of this matters. IOKIYAR*.
*It’s OK If You’re A Republican.
It sounds like they were confusing the youth minimum wage ($4.25, payable for the first 90 days of employment to employees under 20) with the federal minimum wage ($7.25).
To my knowledge my state doesnt have that. Our state minimum wage laws sets the minimum above the federal minimum as well. And that exception only appears to date to 1996, so it wouldn’t appear to bear on the original intent of the minimum.
Its a common right wing arguement used to dismiss minimum wage increases or the minimum wage in general. And tends to go hand in hand with arguements that minimum wage earners are lazy, uneducated, or should just get better jobs. Basically they say the minimum was never meant to provide a fair wage because it was “only for kids” (not true). And since kids don’t actually need money (often not true). There’s no point to raising it or having it at all.
Critically the kids in question are only upper middle class white kids. And kids these days just don’t want to work (more like they arent in desperate need of a shit job with minimum wage pay because they have better options).
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I read the article a couple of days ago. It really frustrates me that people would support someone who wants to destroy their livelihoods like this. But then, these are people who elected a Reality Show person to be president.
It further frustrates me that people support Trump because of his promises, even though he hasn’t followed through on the big ones (Wall, Military out of Middle East, Replace Obamacare, Lock up Hillary). I’ve concluded that Trump could shoot one of his supporters and that person would still vote for him.
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Yes, there’s a lot of that when you try to decode why people vote for these impacted turds.
The reason is that the TGOP propaganda machine consciously exploits rural voters by severing their personal experience from the “big picture”. Rural people have direct experience of migrant workers, and healthcare problems, and tariffs, so politicians who talk about that stuff sound sensible. The GOP’s agenda happens to be bad for rural people on all those issues, but that’s OK, because they use the principle of the Big Lie: it is easier to convince someone that black is white than to convince them that black is charcoal grey.
Rural GOP voters are basically the lab technicians in the bunker in the 1967 Doctor Who serial The Enemy of the World. Periodically a Republican politician shows up faking a limp and says “it’s worse than ever up there, I barely made it past the radiation monsters this time”, and voters are all “wow, it must be really bad for this nice Senator to be foaming at the mouth with hatred like that. We better vote even harder!”
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Formerly the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza. He got #MeToo’d outta that job. Right-wingers are now using that fact to dismiss this report on Nunes.
Note that we’re pretty much on the same page. I mention this as a refutation of the dumb talking point as there already is a separate federal minimum wage “only for kids” first entering the job market and it’s even lower than the regular federal minimum wage. Whatever the original intent is, the current system is clearly intended to target normal adults.
I’d add, that as someone who is nominally paid the tipped minimum wage, I’m working extremely hard to dial back invective…
