Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/we-are-desperate-we-need.html
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God, I hate these assholes.
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Said aloud: “We are desperate - we need more immigrants.”
Not said aloud “From Norway, Sweden, and Denmark”
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Anything to avoid confronting the fact that endless economic growth for favored and incumbent corporate persons is impossible without increased corruption and imported exploitation!
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Yup
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They [several top figures in Trump’s White House] have insisted that the steady arrival of newcomers depresses wages for the blue-collar U.S. workers whose votes helped lift Trump to the presidency in 2016.
Convenient (and dishonest) to blame immigration, when it’s been the growing wealth gap.
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Also, ‘depressed wages’ is cheap labor is one of the things that drive economic growth. What’s good for “the economy” often isn’t good for people.
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Someone tell Boris so he can be surprised with the issue in a few years.
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Note to myself: Look up latest rumblings that Trump is looking to declare more breaks for the rich.
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Shocking that people from those countries aren’t flocking here to do backbreaking physical labor for low pay and no benefits.
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It makes sense.
I’ve been saying for years now the Republican party is divided between the plutocrats at the top who want cheap, expendable labor and the protectionists (bigots, xenophobes and economically insecure) at the bottom who long for the imagined utopia of years passed.
The top has been walking the line for quite awhile by paying lip service to the bottom while demonizing the Democrats for all they’re worth. But now the plutocrats are in a pickle since Trump is actually trying to give his base what they want.
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I feel like that’s a little too far. Trump isn’t trying to do what anyone but Trump wants. Trump happens to be a racist and a xenophobe, so to the extent that the base what xenophobic policies they might be getting them.
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I’m not debating that.
Though, from what little I’ve gleaned of his prior life, I get the sense his xenophobia and racism were more of a casual thing for the most part. But that he leaned into it more and more as he realized it helps get him the attention and support he wants.
At this point, whatever his personal feelings, he needs to keep selling fear of the other for all he can lest he be kicked out of presidential immunity and carted straight to prison.
My contention is it’s less about what Trump personally wants and more a matter of what he desperately needs.
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I’m sorry, I don’t know how to parse this. I don’t believe this at all. If they want people to gain legal status so that they can work there are entire concentration camps full of people that can be registered and sent back to work. The dreamers can receive their citizenship today.
Is this their new strategy, to “leak” faining statements while doing something else?
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Has Mulvaney taken some sort of candour-inducing drug? He is in the UK and said this in a speech in Oxford:
"The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the president,” he said. “Then Donald Trump became president, and we’re a lot less interested as a party.”
Bet they’ll suddenly be fixated on the deficit if a Democrat is elected in November.
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Yeah, it’s beyond hypocrisy; it’s cynical, purposeful lying for votes.
Republicans, from Trump on down, love to hire immigrants, non-immigrant temporary (H visa) workers, and undocumented workers for their own businesses. Beats paying a market rate to attract US citizens.
They lie about immigration, about the free market setting wages, and more broadly about government assistance of the very type they rely upon.
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It’s not impossible Mulvaney is having a real, actual breakdown.
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