My mother grew up in a poor agricultural community, and despite her genteel manners and speech it often showed in the way she raised us.
From first grade until we graduated High School, my mother would take her kids out of school for a day during strawberry season (and sometimes during blueberry or cherry season) and put us to work in the “pick it yourself” fields over in New Jersey. We’d work the rows for eight hours with a break for lunch and a cold drink (and all the strawberries we could eat while we worked) and entirely fill a 1967 Pontiac station wagon with bushels, crates and coolers full of fruit. My mom would then spend two weeks preserving them.
If we complained, my father would laugh heartily and tell us about cutting tobacco to help pay for his college tuition. Fruit picking, in his opinion, was easy work.
To be honest I have never really liked strawberries ever since. That is some hard, sweaty, sunburny stoop labor. I am deeply grateful to the farmers and agricultural workers who do it, so I don’t have to.
I’m thinking my backyard garden just got much more valuable. As in, we’ll have to fortify it, surveil it, and defend it from marauders on 2 legs in addition to the regular 4 leg variety.
My mother told me to make certain I appreciate any job I had she would take me out picking. She drove my brothers and me to a cotton field and had us hand pick dry cotton. Even with gloves I got little cuts all over my hands somehow. It was terrible, hot and exhausting work and I only did it for a couple hours one afternoon. My mother’s family worked in cotton fields every summer to get extra money to save for school.
It was a very rough lesson but an amazingly eye-opening one.
These farmers overwhelmingly voted for him, ironically. (Somehow every time he talked about immigration, they thought it wouldn’t apply to their workers, thanks to the cognitive dissonance of Trump supporters.) So in some respect, it is a feature, not a bug. Just not from the MAGAts perspective.
Trump has now moved on to screwing all his supporters in manufacturing jobs with his steel and aluminum tariffs. I wonder if they’ll learn from the experience.
That was pretty hilarious. Lot’s of “Oh no, please don’t throw us in the briar patch!” responses. Trump then threatened to not build sections of the wall… that the state is suing to block the construction of. Trump doesn’t understand “threats” very well.
That only works if we relocate the farms to coal country, because the coal workers don’t want to move anywhere else. That works, right?
So they are having problems hiring people at substandard wages and poor working conditions?
Bound to raise wages (Be prepared to pay lots more for your food though, cheap labor is the main reason we pay less of a percentage of our income for food than any developed country.) and stimulate development of automated systems so no one has to work 18 hours days of stoop labor for insufficient money.
Or time to implement a genuine “guest worker” system to allow seasonal workers to come and go that will benefit all parties.
Most Americans—even unemployed ones—wouldn’t do that work for twice the wages. As you say the working conditions are poor, but they also require constantly relocation to where the food needs to be harvested. The very nature of the job lends itself to a migrant population.
Republicans used to be reasonable enough on immigration to at least see the appeal of that plan. No more.
Yeah, the work isn’t available to them and they couldn’t do it anyways. It’s not just a matter of unwillingness that stops people from doing this work. You have to be in particular physical condition to do it - it requires strength and skill. (And it still destroys your body to do it.)
It’s a nicely universal (under)statement when it comes to Trumpie, isn’t it? The tariff situation is throwing into sharp focus how Trump can be totally ignorant, at every level, about a subject, regardless of how long he’s been (ostensibly) thinking about it and talking to people. (And how this ignorance not only doesn’t stop him, but fuels his actions.) It’s really breath-taking. I’m honestly baffled about how a person could have such a misunderstanding on subjects that he does - where do these ideas even come from? It seems like he’s been obsessed with certain ideas for decades, yet still doesn’t even have a grade school level of knowledge about them.
He doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a trade deficit and budget deficit; he doesn’t understand what a trade deficit is; he doesn’t understand the impact of tariffs on trade deficits and how they can make them worse, etc. - when he makes up numbers, it seems pointless to correct them, because the entire conversation in which the numbers exist is nonsensical. The press don’t seem to know how to deal with it - how do you talk about presidential orders and statements when absolutely nothing works the way he thinks it does?
if your boogeyman was counterfactual to start with, the appearance of further facts is irrelevant, and
The heart of Turmpism is so nihilistic, I think redhats might actually like the idea of starving in a gutter, as long as city-dwellers feel horrified about it.
While it does satisfy Trump’s hatred for any state that he did not win in the election, I find it hard to believe anything Trump does is actually by design. He probably thought kicking out immigrants would boost their economy, at least according to all the Fox News talking points about increased crime rates and drained public services.
I honestly don’t think he put even that much thought into it. More likely his thought process was “Mexicans bad! Make go way! Trump become hero to base!”
When it comes to gaining the adulation of his Know-Nothing supporters*, Il Douche places the American economy in a distant second place at best (see also: brain-dead protectionism).
[* who, of course, will get screwed over economically by the policies]
Trump doesn’t care, especially because this is Cali-freaking-fornia that is hurting (right now) and he knows he didn’t and never will carry California.
