Saturday, June 22, 2019
Speaker Pelosi ask religious leaders to do their job.
In a statement, Pelosi said: “Tomorrow is Sunday, and as many people of
faith attend religious services, the president has ordered heartless
raids. It is my hope that before Sunday, leaders of the faith-based
community and other organizations that respect the dignity and worth of
people will call upon the president to stop this brutal action, which
will tear families apart and inject terror into our communities.”
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Thanks Margaret. I don't know how anyone can say they're pro-life and support this stuff.
ReplyDeleteThis breaks my heart: the mistreatment of children supposedly in our care. Not to mention what they are doing to adults. Then people are arguing about semantics; what constitutes a "concentration camp" and what doesn't. Hint: the reason we have Holocaust museums is to never forget, and make sure that it never happens again. It doesn't start out with "final solutions"; we get there by increments.
I guess I can't call when the raids begin "Krisstallnacht". It's been copyrighted.
DeleteThese things on the border are concentration camps, pure and simple. Already the pearl clutching wingnuts are claiming that they can't be because concentration camps is a registered trademark of the Holocaust and to call anything else a concentration camp is therefore "anti-Semitic".
DeleteBut the usual suspects will react in the usual way. The Church as an institution "may" object or not, politicized as it is. And some Catholic (or rather, more generally, Christians) will react more usefully and even try to do something about it. And it will just go on.
Trump tweeted a little while ago that he will delay the roundups for two weeks to give the Democrats time to knuckle under or something on immigration. As usual, the tweet is unaccompanied by any indication that some thinking went into it. And, of course, there is no Plan B (ask Iran about that) because Trump always assumes he will win with Plan A. Think about the federal employees working today, Saturday, to put the final touches on plans for next week. Another Little League game missed while the Decider changes his mind. Think about immigrants holding their breath for another two weeks. Think about...
ReplyDeleteWell, no. Don't think, tweet. When the Donfather tweets there is no thinking in sight. Whoops, do I mean "site'? I don't know; I'm half-cocked and loaded.
My in-house editor says I should clarify that last graf lest you think I am too deeply into the cocktail hour. I assume that everyone knows that -- in his great tweet in which the he posed as a humanitarian for not killing 150 Iranians -- the Donfather referred to radar station "sights" when he meant "sites" and said "cocked and loaded," instead of the standard "locked and loaded." The latter is part of firing range instructions for rifle users, but he wouldn't know that having missed out on military experience due to the world's most famous and invisible bone spur. As someone said recently (I wish I could remember who), he knows only 11 words, and he misspells most of them.
DeleteI loved Trump taking credit for calling off an attack on Iran that he himself ordered as though he is a great humanitarian. I was tempted to walk up to a stranger downtown and tell them that they should thank me for saving their life because I had decided not to kill them after all.
ReplyDeleteJesus wept.
Amen. He's doing something similar with ICE round-ups: I am going to put people in squalid conditions and pull their families apart in two weeks. If the Democrats don't stop me, it will be their fault, not mine.
DeleteI think it is all of Congress, not just the Democrats, who supposedly has been given the assignment to work something out over the next two weeks. At our dinner table tonight, we very quickly thought of a perfectly constitutional measure that Congress could initiate in the next couple of weeks ...
Delete"It is my hope that before Sunday, leaders of the faith-based community and other organizations that respect the dignity and worth of people will call upon the president to stop this brutal action, which will tear families apart and inject terror into our communities."
ReplyDeleteHere is Bishop Joe Vasquez of Austin, TX, chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Migration:
“We recognize the right of nations to control their borders in a just and proportionate manner. However, broad enforcement actions instigate panic in our communities and will not serve as an effective deterrent to irregular migration. Instead, we should focus on the root causes in Central America that have compelled so many to leave their homes in search of safety and reform our immigration system with a view toward justice and the common good. We stand ready to work with the Administration and Congress to achieve those objectives.
"During this unsettling time, we offer our prayers and support to our brothers and sisters, regardless of their immigration status, and recognizing their inherent dignity as children of God.”
http://www.usccb.org/news/2019/19-121.cfm
Bishop Vasquez has been pretty plain-spoken in the past. He's being surprisingly politic here.
Y'know, that first sentence -- "We recognize the right of nations to control their borders in a just and proportionate manner" -- ought to go without saying. I mean, it's part of the definition of "border." But if it went without saying, no matter how obviously implicit it is, they could accuse Bishop Vasquez of wanting "open borders." And they would do that, because they are dishonest.
DeleteNot only that, but they will only "hear" that sentence up to the word "borders" and skip over the "justice and proportionate" part. Because they are shoddy thinkers as well as being dishonest. So, you try to avoid the spitball prepared in their pea brains and end up encouraging them.
Pelosi isn't focused on the border here, but on the several large cities that will/may see ICE rounding up the neighbors. Why Trump picked a Sunday is worth a question. What the Immigration police really were planning is another. What is Trump forcing them to do: behave like the gestapo? For protest here, it is parishes and congregations that could step up, stand in front of the ICE guys (enough of them presumably religious) and tell them to stop! I am hoping enough of them are listening. How many of them signed up for ripping fathers and mothers from their children?
ReplyDeleteApparently it was news to ICE that they were supposed to be doing all these Sunday raids - they learned about it when they read the tweets, just like the rest of us.
DeleteThe reference to the Gestapo seems pretty apt. More so than the "debate" supposedly convulsing the country as to whether or not detention centers constitute concentration camps.
I think faith-based groups, and other advocacy groups, would stand between ICE and undocumented immigrants - if they knew where the raids were supposed to take place.
So Trumplestiltskings changes his mind! Wash Post. Sounds like immigration officials said, "not today" or maybe not like that ever.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/22/trumps-acting-dhs-secretary-appears-wary-immigration-raids-that-says-lot/?utm_term=.d5b4544cb8f6
Trump and the Right (and the Left) keep dancing around the immigration problem.
ReplyDeleteThere are between 11 and 22 million undocumented workers in the US right now. They are working and are integrated into the economy. They are indicative of the demand for their labor which is so high it continues to draw in hundreds of thousands of people or more a year, despite the barriers put up to keep them out. Their employers want them because they are cheap and docile and hard working. Consumers want them because they keep prices down. The "illegals" problem is nothing more than a classic supply-demand problem just like drugs and our other supply-demand problems. As long as there is a demand for this labor, the labor will come.
Trump may be too stupid to understand this, but the Republican (and Democratic) Party isn't. Trump might want to deport all the illegals, but it would cause serious problems throughout the economy. He may be getting schooled now that a mass expulsion would seriously hit a lot of his supporters, who hire illegals while castigating them at the same time, because this keeps them afraid and easy to control.
Many Americans don't like the idea of illegals as such ("but they are breaking the laaaawwwwww!" and don't like the idea that many illegals are not white. The sad thing is that to get their support, the Right has to substitute for the real issue a fake problem that goes that illegals get free publicly funded support and that (like all those lazy Black welfare queens that also don't exist) they don't work. The Left knows that this Right-wing narrative is fake. But I blame the Left too, because while it is good that they address the ethical problem of treatment, no one at all is addressing the underlying problem of the need for labor. I suspect that there are at least two reasons for this. The first is that all sides of mainstream political spectrum benefit from the exploitation of this labor in the same way and they don't want to rock that boat. The second reason is that the underlying labor problem is part of a more general labor problem in the US that has to do with everyone's wages, benefits, and working conditions. And no one has the will to tackle this, even the supposedly pro-labor Democratic Party.
There is not a roofer in this county who looks like the pure, white Aryan preferred by the Donfather. Almost ditto landscapers and yard workers. Outdoor jobs are for people born nearer to the Equator. Everybody knows that. Even the Trumpers and Trumpettes acknowledge that, if not for green cards and presumed green cards, they would have holes in the roof and have to mow their own lawns. They say they just want "control" over the numbers. It may not occur to them that if there is a scarcity of people willing to do those jobs, wages would have to rise. If it did occur to them, they might change their thinking and voting.
DeleteNone of these non-Aryan workers are employees. They are "independent contractors," which makes them individually responsible for paying income taxes, FICA and workers comp insurance. Of course, many can't. Those who do will get nothing back from the FICA.
The system of independent contractors started in roofing but spread fast to the skilled trades. Contractors complain that they can't get pure, white Aryans to do those jobs. But those same contractors looked on idly or helped as this right-to-work state destroyed the unions that -- in addition to making sure people got paid (and taxes, FICA and workers comp were covered) -- used to train the skilled Aryans. The union wreckers thought the schools would pick up the slack, but the school systems were squeezed for the benefit of people with kids in private schools. All of that is background to the hooting and hollering at the border.
And I would add that no one (connected to the government or to either party) seems to be investigating what our national labor needs are or will be in the future.
DeleteEVERYONE knows who the illegals are in their neighborhoods. No one is turning in the people who work in the restaurants, yard care places, roofers, asphalt layers, garbage collectors, nannies, etc that they themselves use. It's a national disgrace. NOT that won't turn them in but that they are such hypocrites.
According to my brother in Okie-homa, they're rounding up the wrong people.
DeleteThe illegals mostly want to be Americans. It's the employers who don't want to follow the rule of laaawwwww, and they break it three ways: by hiring illegals and by working people at less than minimum wage and not following OSHA.
So his solution is to seize the assets of the employers, freeze their bank accounts, throw that all into the revenue stream, and send them back to their ancestral homes where they don't know anyone and can't sprechen sie Deutsch or parlee voo. Or, in Trump's case, can't understand the kind of English they speak on the Isle of Lewis.
Jean, your brother sounds pretty wise. One of the chief reasons that Christians should oppose the current situation of undocumented immigrants living in the shadows is that it enables their exploitation by unscrupulous employers.
DeleteYes, not to mention giving coyotes a nice livelihood sealing workers in hot trucks and leaving them in Wal-Mart parking lots. My God. Employers hiring undocumented workers must be complicit in some way with those tragedies.
DeleteI wonder if ICE will hit any Trump properties. Maybe that's what's behind the two-week delay.
Of course my brother is wise, even if he does vote for libertarians and Republicans a lot. He had me for his big mean bossy sister.
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DeleteThe Trump properties have had several under-publicized discharges of employees, plus the Florida family chauffeur who, as of March, was in ICE custody facing deportation (no more recent word). Most of his foreign employees, though, are legally admitted because he "can't get" Americans (a fake fact, according to the local manpower office) for their jobs, which are the more public ones, like waiter.* They come and go on special visas for the season, and they come mostly from eastern Europe, so their race doesn't startle the members of Mar-a-Lago.
Delete*Oddly enough, Joe's Stone Crab in Miami, which is open only during the season, pays its waiters so much that many work only six months and enjoy the beach in the summer. The others go up to the Hamptons and get paid another year's worth of money for six months seasonal work, putting them in the mid- to high six-figure range. The great deal maker hasn't figured out how to do that, I guess.
Yes, Jean.
DeleteIf "illegals" are such a crisis for the US, we could stop it in two months by passing a law that requires that people hiring them go to Federal prison for one year for each infraction and have the offending premises confiscated. After all, illegal immigration is an "invasion" that threatens "American sovereignty" to a point where we need to station the military on the border.
Right?
I just don't see how, if people at the southern border are such a huge threat, the people hiring them aren't guilty of violating our sovereignty--perhaps more than the undocumented people who are in dire financial straits and don't understand how things work here.
DeleteOh, and now (off topic) Trump is going to reduce our health care costs by some kind of pricing transparency, which I don't really understand and hope Patrick will explain.
But the crux seems to be that this will work like the vet, who explains it will cost $500 to figure out what's wrong with your cat and do you want to go ahead with that?
I'm sure that will be helpful to Raber when he takes me to the ER with a brain bleed to be told it's going to cost $10,000 to take a looky loo, so should we go ahead of maybe do you want to check several other places that might be cheaper first?
I'm sorry. I guess I'm at the point where I just want to see me some Republicans in jumpsuits and shackles locked up in cages.
Forget the "prayers and support." How about threatening excommunication of any Catholic politicians who jump on the TrumpAsshat bandwagon of concentration camps, family splitting, child losing, ad nauseum "politics?" Or is that only used for pro-choice politicians?
ReplyDelete"Canonical penalties" range from denial of Communion to excommunication. Last year, on June 12 (we just missed the anniversary), Bishop Edward Weisenberger of Tucson said about Catholics aiding in the Trump border project: "Canonical penalties are there in place to heal. Maybe it is time for us (bishops) to look at canonical penalties." That was during the 2018 USCCB spring meeting.
DeleteBut I don't believe he got a second.
Tom: and you are surprised by a lack of second from the Republican Bishops at Prayer why????????????
DeleteThe immigrant pickers do a good job. The roofers, not so much. I probably have the last roof job done by Aryans several years ago. No problems. My friend had hers done by Central Americans. Not so great. Perhaps just part of the overall shoddification of America.
DeleteThose of us who life in California know that the growers in the Central Valley … the breadbasket of the USofTrump … cannot harvest or plant crops if they depend on White Folks to do the work. Without the illegals you'd be paying a ton more for imports from the rest of the world. The same problem exists up here in the wine country of Napa and Sonoma counties. Even if these growers and vintners would be willing to pay or exceed minimum wages, getting White Folks and many others to do the hard, dirty, stoop-labor jobs simply isn't possible.
ReplyDelete