Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Most Undocumented Immigrants Are Not "Illegals" Or "Criminals"
Donald Trump wants to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and he has appointed people willing to do that (Miller, Homan, Noem). That massive deportation will have serious consequences for our economy, inflation, businesses (who need those workers), and tax revenue (since these immigrants pay billions of dollars in taxes).
Some on the right have said Trump will just be deporting criminals. They are both wrong and right. They are wrong because Trump wants to deport millions who have committed no crime. They are right because Trump and his cohorts consider all undocumented immigrants to be "illegal" and therefore "criminals".
The idea that undocumented immigrants are criminals is a popular idea in this country, but it is wrong! Most undocumented immigrants are neither illegal nor criminal, because they have violated no federal criminal law.
Trump Is Giving His Middle Finger To America
From Robert Reich on the nomination of RFK, Jr to head the Department of Health and Human Services:
Nominating conspiracist and fabulist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the nation’s leading health job — overseeing the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health, among other sensitive positions — is an act of utter hubris.
At a time when the truth is a precious common good, and the public’s health is already precarious, RFK Junior has made a name for himself spreading dangerous health lies.
He claimed that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” And that “the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.”
He has promoted the baseless claim linking vaccines to autism. He’s been a leading proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, erroneously suggesting the vaccine has killed more people than it has saved.
In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, he alleged, without plausible evidence, that Dr. Fauci performed “genocidal experiments, sabotaged treatments for AIDS, and conspired with Bill Gates to suppress information about COVID-19.”
All nonsense.
Friends, I knew Robert F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy Junior is no Robert F. Kennedy. If not for his lustrous name, RFK Junior would be just another crackpot in the ever-growing pool of bottom-feeding fringe characters encircling Trump like ravenous slugs.
So why nominate this collection of bozos?
If Trump wants to smoke out the Senate Republicans who aren’t fully behind him, he has easier ways of doing so than putting an entire Star Wars cantina of idiots up for Senate confirmation.
I can see why Trump might want total loyalists in key positions that would enable him to turn America into a police state — more on this tomorrow — but why nominate a nut job to run America’s health system?
What possible point is there to subjecting Americans to poisonous food or drugs? Why undermine the Centers for Disease Control when Americans and their children need the protections vaccines provide?
Or is all this just another manifestation of Trump becoming deranged?
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Americans Want Stricter Gum Laws (But Did Not Vote For That)
This chart is from the Gallup Poll - done between October 1st and 12th of a nationwide sample of 1,023 adults, with a 4 point margin of error.
A Government Of Billionaires, By Billionaires, And For Billionaires
The following is just part of a post by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:
Trump wants to deflect our attention while he and his fellow billionaires loot America.
As he consolidates power, Trump is on his way to creating a government of billionaires, by billionaires, for billionaires.
Trump intuitively knows that the most powerful and insidious of all alliances is between rich oligarchs and authoritarian strongmen.
Two billionaires are leading his transition team. The richest person in the world and another billionaire will run a new department of “efficiency.” Other billionaires are waiting in the wings to be anointed to various positions.
America is now home to 813 billionaires whose cumulative wealth has grown a staggering 50 percent since before the pandemic.
Apologists for these mind-boggling amounts argue they’re not a zero-sum game where the rest of us must lose ground in order for billionaires to prosper. Quite the contrary, they say: The billionaire’s achievements expand the economic pie for everyone.
But the apologists overlook one important thing. Power is a zero-sum game. The more power in billionaire hands, the less power in everyone else’s. And power cannot be separated from wealth, or wealth from power.
The shameless feeding frenzy that has already begun at the troughs of Trump — planning for more tax cuts for the wealthy, regulatory rollbacks to make the wealthy and their corporations even wealthier, subsidies for the wealthy and their enterprises — constitute a zero-sum power game that will hurt average Americans.
The pending tax cuts will explode the national debt. As a result, the rest of America will have to pay more in interest payments to the holders of that debt — who, not incidentally, are wealthy Americans.
This will require that the middle and working classes either pay higher taxes or sacrifice some benefits they rely on (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act).
Meanwhile, regulatory rollbacks will make workplaces less safe, products more dangerous, our air and water more polluted, national parks less welcoming, travel more hazardous, and financial transactions riskier for average people.
Monday, November 18, 2024
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