I received the following message from Beto O’Rourke. I’m on his mailing list because I contributed to his campaign for the Senate. He makes so much sense that I wonder why the Trump administration doesn’t lead to him. I have to conclude that Trump wants the Crisis, as red meat to feed his base. He thrives on crisis and needs to look like he alone is holding back the brown hordes at the border.
Beto wrote:
It should tell us something about her home country that a mother is willing to travel 2,000 miles with her 4-month-old son to come here. Should tell us something about our country that we only respond to this desperate need once she is at our border. So far, in this administration, that response has included taking kids from their parents, locking them up in cages, and now tear gassing them at the border.
People are leaving violent countries where they fear for their lives. Without money, they are subsisting on hope for their kids, for themselves, that they can get to safety. After being denied the ability to lawfully petition for asylum for the last 10 days, they are desperate.
We choose how to respond to this challenge.
Let’s do this the right way and follow our own laws. Allow asylum seekers to petition for asylum at our ports of entry. They must do so peacefully and follow our laws; but we must also ensure the capacity to effectively and timely process those claims (right now 5,000 waiting in Tijuana and only 40 to 100 are processed a day).
Those who have a credible fear of returning to their home country (as determined by a U.S. judge) will be able stay until their full asylum request has been determined. Those applicants ultimately granted asylum will then live in the U.S., make us a better country for being here, and those who are not granted asylum will be returned to their home country.
Longer term: work with the people of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to address underlying conditions that are causing them to flee in the first place. That means addressing effects of our failed past involvement in those countries (in their civil wars, drug trade and drug wars) and the institutional failings in those countries (rule of law).
It won’t be easy and will involve a much greater investment of time, focus and resources. Or we can continue to ignore those countries and their people until they show up at our border.
– Beto
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane I think if we really wanted to do something about the drugs coming into this country we could. But it is big business and I look at it as the “new-age” military industrial complex. If we can deploy thousands of troops at a moments notice to a border, then what is stopping us from using those same troops at all of our ports to check EVERYTHING coming into this country from others and to check all airplanes and vehicles etc.? I truly think our governments (note the plural) are in cahoots over this. It’s just another way to keep our society down. Especially the poor. It is beyond me how we can land a spacecraft on a small designated area on Mars, but we can’t root out where narcotics are being grown. Sigh.
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Reagan’s CIA used proceeds from these illegal drugs to fund its illegal wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking
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yes — it is surely time to admit to a GROWING military industrial complex: the overwhelming surplus of soldier equipment and guns, the endlessly produced weaponry, the years-long stream of men and women coming back from ongoing “wars” needing work….
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I copy/pasted Beto O’Rourke’s comment and sent it to my Republican Senator Todd Young [R-IN]. I added this comment of my own. Young is a sycophant of Trump’s and does no thinking for himself. Of course Indiana is a red state and he wants to stay in power.
…..
I am sending a well written response from Beto O’Rouke concerning how badly the US is treating people who walk miles to come to our borders. They are desperate to get away from violence, starvation and unemployment. This desperation is caused by how the US has worked in these countries in the past. Trump is a bigoted, hate-filled person. Those who want amnesty need to be processed much more quickly. Add people who process amnesty instead of the horrors of a military who shoot tear gas and put up barbed wire. [Only 40-100 amnesty applicants are processed each day.] Only desperate people try so hard to improve their lives. The US is going ever lower in the eyes of the world. Don’t be part of this downgrade. [I am a former Peace Corps volunteer and I’ve seen the poverty south of our border. I also worked in Bolivia for two years.] We need to help these countries overcome their poverty. Don’t join Trump in being racist and bigoted nor spread fear and loathing for struggling people.
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The primary state propaganda organ, Faux News, and its Führer, Don Cheeto Trumpbalone, aka Don the Con, aka Vlad’s Agent Orange, spent months, during the run-up to the election, working the troglodytes in his base into a fury over the “George Soros-sponsored terrorist invasion caravan” (in reality, a few hundred desperately poor families–refugees fleeing violence and starvation in Honduras). Racism worked in 2016 to pump up the base, so they thought they would try this again.
Trumpty Dumpty followed this act with a publicity stunt, sending thousands of US troops to the border, where they will miss Thanksgiving with their families and have NOTHING TO DO–NO MISSION. And what will all this cost? An estimated $200 million.
Think of how many migrant families could have been sheltered and given some farm implements and a plot of land in Mexico for $200 million dollars.
Suppose that the inflated Faux News number of 7,000 in the Caravan is correct. Further suppose that the average family in that caravan consists of 4 people. That would mean that we’re talking about 1,750 families. $200 million would be enough to give each family a starting stake of $50,000, with $112.5 million left over for program administration costs, which would probably cost less than half that. So, for far LESS than what Trumpty spent on his publicity stunt, we could have dealt with this refugee crisis in a humane and compassionate manner worthy of our great nation.
While this was going on, Trumpty Dumpty was spending five days playing golf at Mar-a-Lago on your dime. So far, his golf trips during his presidency have cost taxpayers about 80 million.
And Melania? Well, while these CHILDREN were being tear gassed, she was overseeing the most extravagantly costly Christmas decoration in the history of the White House, featuring, appropriately enough, blood-red Christmas trees. The juxtaposition of a picture of Melania with in her $50,000 outfit walking through her blood trees and pictures of mothers and children fleeing tear gas looks a lot like previews for the next installment of The Hunger Games.
And, of course, it’s just about time for Trump to issue his annual statement about “the war on Christmas”–you know, Christmas, the birthday of Yeshua of Nazareth, who said,
“And the King shall answer and say unto them, ‘Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.'” –Matt. 25:40, KJV
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Bob,
You are, of course, spot on. Thank you for your eloquence.
And those RED Christmas trees in the WH are really GROSS. Maybe the red is a SYMBOL for the BLOOD on this administrations’ hands,
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Maybe the red trees in the White House are a tribute to Russia.
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Someone should make a video of the juxtaposition you mention, Bob, using, as the sound track, Simon & Garfunkel’s “Silent Night & the Six o’ Clock News.”
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One would think that there would be a problem with SIMULTANEOUSLY honoring the birth of a child AND tear gassing children. But this is what it’s come to. Sickening.
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That child would not be allowed into this country.
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This. Says. It. All.
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This is one example of how corporations work to get higher profits at the expense of lowered standards of living for the local work force. This US does this and then condemns the immigrants who can’t live in their own countries and out of desperation flee here. They can be shot with tear gas by our military and kept out with barbed wire. We take their children away and put them in cages or in a tent city. Gad, what a country. [I worked in Bolivia for two years and studied Spanish for three weeks in Guatemala.]
………………….
Corporations and Worker’s Rights
by Anup ShahThis Page Last Updated Sunday, May 28, 2006
Structural Adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank have led to a race to the bottom, where standards of living are continuously reduced. Labor, as one example of this, gets cheaper and cheaper which benefits the multinational companies, but not the workers themselves. Various international trade agreements that large corporations are able to strongly lobby favorable conditions in, are often designed in part to make resources (including work forces) cheaper.
As some corporations and industries become increasingly globalized, they effect more and more people. Take for example the situation in Massachusetts — they were trying to put laws in place to prevent or restrict corporations doing business with regimes that violate certain rights of people in some way — they were pressured by a coalition of 600 major corporations in that State, saying that this is unconstitutional. The judges agreed…
Phillips-Van-Huesen have been criticized for closing a factory in Guatemala because the workers tried to form a union to protect their basic rights. A report by three human rights organizations revealed the details. It reveals how the company closed a factory in order to destroy the union and profit from lower wages by sweatshop contractors in Guatemala. ..
Some of the tax fiddling and avoidance that some large corporations are able to legally perform are at enormous costs to the public, as shown in the corporate evasion section on this web site…
http://www.globalissues.org/article/57/corporations-and-workers-rights
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“Lock him up.”
………………………….
In a meeting with House Republicans, Mr. Trump insisted that he would veto a hefty year-end spending bill unless it included $5 billion for a southern border wall. The fight could lead to a partial government shutdown next week.
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Of course Trump wants the “crisis”. That’s what neoliberalism is. Never let a crisis go to waste. And if you don’t have a convenient crisis, create one. If you haven’t read THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, remedy that today – should be required reading for everyone on the planet. Trump is no different than previous administrations except in how openly grotesque he is about it.
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Yep–“never let a crisis go to waste”–from Rahm Emanuel.
Pretty grotesque as well, in the closing of 50 Chicago public schools.
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How much longer can a country sustain this support with a deficit of 23 trillion.
In 2017, 51 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) reported that they used at least one welfare program during the year, compared to 30 percent of native households. Welfare in this study includes Medicaid and cash, food, and housing programs.
Welfare use is high for both new arrivals and well-established immigrants. Of households headed by immigrants who have been in the country for more than two decades, 48 percent access welfare.
Immigrant households have much higher use of food programs (40 percent vs. 22 percent for natives) and Medicaid (42 percent vs. 23 percent).
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Ah, but we have plenty of money for tax cuts for the wealthy! And plenty for foreign wars. And plenty for spending on private health insurance in this country where per capita healthcare costs are DOUBLE what they are in the OECD generally.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/illegal-immigrant-benefits/
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Oh please, stop with the deficit and welfare fear mongering. The GOP only cares about the deficits when Democrats are in power. Tax cuts on the rich ARE THE #1 PROBLEM!!!! Stop giving away trillions to the super rich and the giant corporations, that will solve the deficit problem. Welfare is not the problem, not even close. Medicaid is not welfare, it’s a necessity because this nation refuses to adopt universal health care like all the other wealthy democracies such as Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Finland, etc. Welfare was reformed in 1996 by Clinton and huge pressure from the GOP and gargoyles like Gingrich. The welfare rolls have since been reduced by 60% because of those cruel welfare reforms under Clinton. I guess you also think that Social Security and Medicare are welfare?! Wrong.
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While many immigrants require some type of assistance in order to exist here, they are still a net plus to our economy. Contrary to what our feckless leader would want us to believe, immigrant neighborhoods have lower crime rates. Recent immigrants do not sit around collecting government checks. They work like dogs for long hours, often in unsafe conditions for meager paychecks. Sometimes, they get cheated by their employer, but they have no recourse to rectify the injustice. Recent immigrants often take the jobs Americans reject. They work in agriculture, service industries and construction off the books. Many of them also start their own businesses because they cannot legally work for most legitimate companies. They are marginalized so they survive the best way they can, and sometimes their family needs a little assistance. Most of them have ZERO hope of becoming legal because our immigration system is broken, and the industries that benefit from their cheap labor want it that way.
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Exactly. Extraordinarily well said. All economists know that immigrants–who need haircuts and buy groceries like everyone else–create demand like everyone else and so create jobs (rather than taking them from American workers, as Trump continually implies). They also create small businesses at 10 times the rate that other citizens do and employee both other immigrants AND many of the poorest of Americans. And, of course, illegal immigrants have the lowest crime rates of any subgroup in our population. It really is long past time for the Democratic Party to start calling out these lies.
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So true…there have been more than the usual “Help Wanted” signs in restaurant windows, I’ve noticed (people leaving, afraid of ICE). So, too, have landscaping businesses had trouble keeping up this summer: all of their workers have been in hiding.
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There would be plenty of money of the billionaires and big business titans were forced to pay their fair share of taxes. We have poverty because we can’t satisfy the rich.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Beto is a reasonable and rational person. He wants a humane resolution. I hope the Democrats realize what a gift they have in Beto. I would love to see them offer him the VP slot to him, no matter who they decide to run. The guy has momentum and young voters behind him despite his loss in Texas.
Central America would not be such a mess if Americans didn’t crave drugs so much. Here’s a shock doctrine idea! Maybe we should just legalize it all, tax it and put the enforcement money into treatment. Then, we no longer have to spend a fortune on enforcement, and the Cartels would lose their power. I know we are too puritanical to adopt such a radical idea. We would rather fight a continuous war that can’t be won forever.
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Portugal decriminalized all drugs. The result? Dramatic reductions in penal costs, crime, AND drug usage. And, of course, this made it a lot easier to identify and treat peope with drug problems. We need to do the same and start treating this as a mental health problem rather than as a criminal problem.
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You can thank Tricky Dick Nixon for our problems with drugs. Those damned hippies and their pot smoking and those awful black panthers with a needle full of opium in their veins. All to distract for what was really going on at the time….Viet Nam and racial wars that were a threat to his presidency and possible re election.
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Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “War on Drugs” in 1971 and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away.
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Nixon’s invention of the War on Drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since — Democrat and Republican alike — has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the Drug War is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesn’t end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction.
–Reporter Dan Baum, The Atlantic, 2016
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This whole immigration “problem” is a manufactured phony baloney ruse to whip up the populace into a frenzy so they won’t notice real problems: lack of affordable medical care, the rip off/obscene costs of medications, stagnant wages, tax give aways to the top 1%, and the destruction of unions, for example. Unfortunately the immigration so called problem works like a charm, stirs up nativism, xenophobia and chauvinism, it helped to elect Trump in 2016 with big help from the cursed Electoral College.
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Exactly
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I have my suspicions about DUMP and the caravan.
I also have my suspicions about the flood of cocaine coming into this country from South America.
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Actually, there is no crisis. From my understanding requests for assylum and/or entrance to this country is no where near any kind of all-time high.
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