Monday Reading

As always, please go the the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Iowa's Art Cullen sets everyone straight on who and what's behind the racist war on immigrants who are doing much of the dirty work many "real 'mericans" won't take:

To set things straight: The people who want to deport the undocumented are the same people who wanted to bust the unions because they had too much power. Once busted, meatpackers were able to cut wages in half in the 1980s. The United Food and Commercial Workers is hamstrung by the dismantling of the National Labor Relations Act during the Reagan Administration. Since then, rural meatpacking communities have become weaker. Immigrants get blamed for taking jobs that resident citizens could have. But the jobs in Mississippi for poor people have always been exploitive. It’s a messed-up system: Put value on skills so no one wants to work in unskilled labor, recruit the unskilled to fill the jobs that Biff and Buffy who went off to college don’t want, exploit them, criminalize them, deport them, then complain about low wages brought by the great unwashed. The immigrants and poor black people do not set the wage. The boss does. He made sure the union went down. He made sure everyone thought that the Hygrade union man was getting paid too much. He convinced everyone that the union was stealing your paycheck. And now people complain that immigrants are ruining this country.

They didn’t break the unions, and they don’t set the wage. We want cheap food. Immigrants provide it, so we crucify them. Biff is learning arbitrage and hedging to be used later on livestock contracting.

We need a big change in this country.

So we do.  But let's not look to the press to be on the side of positive change.  Pressthink's Jay Rosen has several problems with the press he worries about going forward, one of which is this:

Explicitly or implicitly, it seems likely that Trump is going to run a racist re-election campaign in 2020, in which “othering” (not a word I like, but it’s the best I can do…) is basic to his appeal to voters. This goes way beyond noisy controversies like whether to use the term “racist.” Is the press ready for a campaign like that? Does it have the people and practices in place to respond? Is it willing to break with precedent to meet a threat without parallel? I doubt it.

From what we've seen so far, we doubt it also (see Masha Gessen's timeless piece on surviving an autocracy, especially rule number 3).

But, to give credit where due, the Tampa Bay Times uncovered the revealing Congressional Republican memo directing how members should respond to white nationalist/ supremacist mass shootings:

Congressional Republicans recently circulated talking points on gun violence that falsely described the El Paso massacre and other mass shootings as “violence from the left.”

A document obtained by the Tampa Bay Times and sent by House Republicans provides a framework for how to respond to anticipated questions like, “Why won’t you pass legislation to close the ‘gun show loophole’ in federal law?” and “Why shouldn’t we ban high-capacity magazines?" The answers are boilerplate Republican arguments against tougher gun restrictions.

But it also included this question: “Do you believe white nationalism is driving more mass shootings recently?” The suggested response is to steer the conversation away from white nationalism to an argument that implies both sides are to blame.

The amoral bastards are aiding and abetting their shock troops shooting up innocent civilians with their NRA- approved military grade automatic weapons.  That's about par for the course for them.

And at least one journalist, the Washington Post's Dave Weigel, casts a knowing wink at a habit of media types who regularly go on safari to capture the thoughts of the heartland:

Feels like an incumbent who can’t break 40% against any top challenger is in trouble, but we don’t know how many of these voters were polled in rust belt diners. pic.twitter.com/frKnLP3PFo

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) August 15, 2019

Your next stop should be Infidel 753's round- up of links to interesting posts around the internet, if you haven't already been there.  Also, his analysis of the pro- democracy movements in Russia and China is a good read on a topic that's frequently lost in our self- absorption as Americans.