“Our Country is full!” That’s an ignorant quote from exactly where we would expect it, Donald Trump, twice impeached, many times indicted former President of this country, and our national disgrace. It’s also one of the opening quotes in “Immigration Breakdown,” Fareed Zacharia’s new documentary on the problems and prospects for our burgeoning immigration disaster.
Fareed quickly points to the fact that it isn’t immigration that’s the problem with some Americans it’s the lack of white immigration that upsets them. So, immigration isn’t the problem at all, it’s bigotry.
No one has ever opposed immigration from Germany and Sweden, but huge numbers of white supremacists are dead set against immigration from Asia, India, Africa, South America, and even southern Europe. And this isn’t something new. It’s always been this way.
Right now, it’s the far right that stands in the way of opening our borders to far more legal immigration than we have. That means idiots like Trump stand in front of crowds of other idiots and declare; “Our Country is full.”
Like an enormous percentage of everything else Trump says, it’s a lie. In fact, it is so outrageous a lie that it’s almost not worth refuting. The truth is the lack of immigration is a major cause of inflation. The fact that we just don’t have enough bodies to fill all the jobs that are available drives-up wages, which is good until they reach a point where they cause prices to rise in order to keep products profitable, and that’s inflation. Sure, it all started with Trump and his ridiculous economic theories, but you’d never know that to hear the GOP babble about it now.
Nations cannot stay economically stable. They either surge ahead or fall behind. One of the principal ways in which they surge ahead is increasing the GDP and that is done by buying and selling more and more product. One of the ways to make that work is to increase the labor force. One of the ways we do that is to have more babies. But the United States is producing less babies, so the labor force has to increase through the importation of workers from other countries and yes, most of those will not be white. Too fucking bad!
Look, most of the people in the world are not white. Those who are, mostly come from countries that are doing okay economically, so they are not looking to immigrate here. The redneck assholes who didn’t want to go to school just have to live with the fact that if they want industry in good ole Idiotbend, they are going to have to live with the fact that some percentage of the workers will not be white and most of them will be immigrants.
What we need now are immigration laws that lay out the process in workable terms and enough bureaucracy to support that process in a functional manner. Maybe if we can make that happen, the stupid people will see the process can work and understand why we have been bragging for a couple of centuries about this being a nation of immigrants.
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Th Governor of New Jersey is suing the Federal Government to stop the State of New York from imposing Congestion Pricing on the people of both states. He’s doing it because he sees, as do most logical people, that it is not an environmental solution, but an attempted bailout for New York’s continually mismanaged MTA.
The fact is, no matter how much fantasy NY Governor Kathy Hochul and the board of the MTA weave, Congestion Pricing will help neither the environment nor the MTA, because they are mutually opposed in their goals.
If the imposition of congestion pricing manages to reduce the number of cars going below 60th Street in Manhattan it will also reduce the total fines collected for the MTA, thereby killing that goal. If, on the other hand, enough money is collected to actually bail out the MTA it will mean that the number of cars below 60th Street will not have been reduced enough to help with the traffic, or the pollution. There is no having it both ways.
I find it interesting that Biden has completely missed the boat on this one by backing Congestion Pricing even as he has attacked the long-term solution in his Infrastructure bill by giving life to two new rail tunnels that will connect Jersey City with Manhattan, providing a safe, fast, convenient means of entry to its job market.
If those in charge really want to move traffic in NYC, all they have to do is look to the removal of the thousands of temporary pergolas that have been erected by local restaurants to move their diners outside during the COVID crisis. The crisis is long gone, the pergolas are filthy eyesores overrun by rats that need to be removed, if only for sanitary purposes. I know all the restaurant owners will scream that the city is trying to put them out of business but there is no reason, when sidewalks are wide enough, why they simply can’t move tables & chairs onto them, instead of blocking the street.
Hochul, Murphy and all interested parties would be well served by a serious attempt to shut down the MTA and replace it with something that displays, at least, an attempt at functionality.
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So, Rudy Giuliani has admitted he lied about the innocent poll workers that he and Trump accused of switching votes during Trump’s attempt at stealing, an election. These two women were terrorized, and their lives ruined by the scum that bought Trump and Giuliani’s lies. Both Trump and Giuliani should be prosecuted. Sue, I know, there are already so many cases ahead of this, including one brought by these women that it boggles the mind, but put it on the list anyway.
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There’s a story in Friday’s NY Post by a young woman named Amy Swearer in which she admonished the American women’s soccer team for not singing the National Anthem.
It’s not that they were demonstrating against some perceived evil, its just that they were too lazy or uninterested to join in.
Amy holds up past women’s soccer teams that that sang lustily, albeit badly, as examples that should be followed, and hints at a lack of patriotism. I would kind of lean toward Amy’s point of view except for the fact that she is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Society, a once respected organization that has of late, fallen under the influence of the far, far right and turned into a tool of men like Trump, McCarty, Cruz, and Jorden, who have not even a hint of patriotism about them. It’s the Heritage Society that picked the newest justices that have turned the Supreme Court into an engine of white supremacist ideology. Maybe if Amy and her Heritage Society pseudo-Nazis were a little less interested in who’s singing the words and a little more interested in who’s living up to the spirit of the anthem, this whole nation would be a lot better off.