Labor On Demand

Buzzfeed reports

In a Saturday meeting with his newly announced Hispanic advisory council, Donald Trump suggested he is interested in figuring out a “humane and efficient” manner to deal with immigrants in the country illegally, according to three sources. Trump, however, stressed that any new announcements will still be in line with the border security-focused approach that has invited intense opposition from Latinos and immigrants since he launched his campaign....

“The idea is we’re not getting someone in front of the line, we’re doing it in a legal way, but he wants to hear ideas of how we deal with 11 million people that are here with no documents,” said Jose Fuentes, who was chair of Mitt Romney’s Hispanic advisory committee in 2012, and attended the meeting.

Donald Trump's interest in "hear(ing) ideas of how we deal with 11 million people that are here with no documents" is nothing new.  As Javier Palomerez, president and CEO of the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce informed Chris Hayes on September 1, 2015 (and I noted a few days later), Trump had told him "we agreed on this notion of mass deportation of 11 million people."

(In the video below, Palomarez said they "disagreed" on mass deportation. However, the context of the Hayes discussion suggests "agreed" is an accurate transcription and I heard Palomarez say it live.)








Trump never has opposed allowing illegal immigrants to remain. As a businessperson interested most of all in profit, he recognizes the value of illegal immigrants, beholden and tied to their employer, in maintaining low wage rates, decreasing benefits, and instigating competition among employees.

The GOP nominee's economic team is not composed of populists dedicated to the working class, determined to curb income inequality and reverse the decline of the middle class.  Most are  supply-siders such as FreedomWorks' Stephen Moore, formerly of The Wall Street Journal and the Club for Growth, once succinctly and accurately described by Mike Huckabee as the "Club for Greed." Giving the boot to low-paid workers competing with other workers is the furthest thing from the mind of Moore and most of Trump's advisers.

That makes all the more reprehensible the written statement of the campaign's Steven Cheung, slamming the Buzzfeed account as "clickbait journalism," that "Mr. Trump said nothing today that he hasn’t said many times before, including in his convention speech—enforce the laws, uphold the Constitution, be fair and humane while putting American workers first."

Whatever the merits of what may, or may no, be regarded as a pivot, Trump is definitely not putting "American workers first." He is reflecting the priorities of many GOP base voters and more closely those of the Party's politicians and donor base.

They are not excited about throwing out of the country illegal immigrants, which would simultaneously highlight the effectiveness of Party enemies- government and its workers- while simultaneously providing providing bad optics.  The mantra is "secure the border" or "first secure the border."  They are not necessarily opposed tolegalization, which would increase the number of workers tied to their employer without giving the workers an opportunity to become American citizens.

Failing to acquire the status of citizenship, workers likely would not be eligible for benefits or, as much of the base views it, "free stuff."  Criticially, they would not gain the right to vote.

Building the wall- and it just got ten feet higher- is red meat for the masses. The goal of the movers and shakers of the Republican Party is legalization without citizenship, creating workers who cannot become full-fledged Americans. The goal is more competition for a scarce number of jobs from individuals who, not given a chance to earn citizenship, might respond with the same respect for this (not their) country, thus incurring the nativist wrath of their Party's base. It's a win-win-win!








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No Substantive Pivot

In January Politifact rated as "pants on fire" the assertion of Michigan Representative Mike Rogers, who had on CNN argued "I think we're missing one important point here. Donald Trump is appealing as much to Democrats as he is to Republicans.And anybody that misses this point by missing the folks on the street who are drawn to his campaign."

It is now seven months later and the meme, now repackaged as support deriving from voters facing economic anxiety, will not die.  Trump's popularity, Steve M. recognizes, now is often mistakenly

attributed to white America's increasing sense of economic displacement, as manufacturing jobs continue to disappear and the well-to-do benefit disproportionately from the economic recovery. We've been told that Trump is appealing to the same sense of economic unfairness that drove the campaign of Bernie Sanders.

It is hogwash now, just as it was early in the year, and SM blows  the whistle on it by pointing out that the voice on Trump's new commercial remarks

In Hillary Clinton’s America, the system stays rigged against Americans. Syrian refugees flood in. Illegal immigrants convicted of committing crimes get to stay, collecting Social Security benefits, skipping the line. Our border open. It’s more of the same, but worse.

Donald Trump’s America is secure, terrorists and dangerous criminals kept out. The border secure. Our families safe. Change that makes America safe again. Donald Trump for president.








The ad "starts by telling us that the system is rigged (but) doesn't see any rigging in the economic system."  Instead, the thrust is

about fear of the Other -- including, we can safely infer, that opening shot of a polling place entrance and the words "system rigged," which, to Trump's base, is a dog whistle meaning "Democratic machine bosses in big cities with large non-white populations are going to manipulate the vote in Clinton's favor."

Shortly before the 2012 election, a Monmouth University poll found that 51% of Republicans thought "voter fraud is a major problem nationally," as its analysis put it.  A few months earlier, 57% of Republicans were found by The Washington Post to consider it a major problem in presidential elections.  Earlier this month, Trump claimed he would lose Pennsylvania in November only "if cheating goes on."

 African-Americans and illegal  immigrants, in the minds of many Republicans, are manipulated into voting for Democrats. With surveys now indicating that Hillary Clinton may surpass Barack Obama's share of the two-party black vote, there is little doubt who is suspected of cheating.

The myth is reflected in Trump's recent statement, theoretically directed toward African-Americans, "You're living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. 58% of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?" Why, he might have asked, do you persist in being manipulated into voting against the Party which in many states is trying to deny you the right to vote?







Just as Trump's ad suggests no manner in which the system- or anything- is "rigged," so he offers no substantive proposals for improving the lot of the impoverished, which in his telling, apparently includes all blacks. (But it's all Hillary Clinton's fault.)

There is no new Trump. There only is the same old Trump, lumping together everyone of an ethnic group (such as blacks, Mexicans, and Arabs), who vote illegally and cheat to get free benefits, all the while manipulating a "rigged" system (or rigged something).   Add it all up, and to Donald Trump, the opposition- like John McCain - represents a bunch of losers.








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The Right To Vote, As Long As It's For Trump

On Tuesday night in Wisconsin, Donald Trump gave a speech covering a grab bag of issues in a remarkably superficial fashion.  (The only transcript available seems to be the one prepared for delivery, and given the candidate's penchant for going off-strip, any quotes may not be identical to his words as delivered.)   Trade, education, and Islamic terrorism also were trotted out for a cameo role.

It also was a highly partisan speech, in which Grump claimed

The Democratic Party has run nearly every inner city in this country for 50 years, and run them into financial ruin. 

They've ruined the schools.

They've driven out the jobs.

Most of all, crime must be attributed to Democrats, and primarily to his opponent because "Hillary Clinton-backed policies are responsible for the problems in the inner cities today, and a vote for her is a vote for another generation of poverty, high crime, and lost opportunities."

Grump was short on facts, long on generalities and short on specifics, though he did complain about conditions in "inner cities,"  which is nowhere an official designation, unlike cities, towns, townships, boroughs, etc. But for voters over the age of 50 it is translated as "black"  and sounds like a dogwhistle out of Frank Luntz's bag of rhetorical dirty tricks.

It's not surprising that a candidate who has warned "We're going to watch Pennsylvania. Go down to certain areas and watch and study make sure other people don't come in and vote five times" had his eyes on the votes of white supremacists as he gave a speech pretending to be concerned about minorities.

No one can say for certain whether Grump in his shout-out to vigilantism was referring to illegal immigrants, obviously a particular scourge to him, or blacks, who make up the dominant voting bloc for Democrats in Pennsylvania.   But Trump has charged the system is "rigged" and supporters have portrayed him as willling to challenge both Democratic and Republican members of the Establishment.

Yet, he didn't mention the effort underway in many states, led invariably by Republicans and typically opposed by Democrats, to prevent blacks from voting.  Were it not intentional from a man who throughout his speech ignored the structural barriers to equality of opportunity in American society, it would be only an egregious oversight.

The GOP tactic of suppressing the vote of blacks and Latinos is no mere oversight, and belies any expression of concern for either group.  In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down a voter idenification law in North Carolina because

The photo ID requirement, which applies only to in-person voting and not to absentee voting, is too narrow to combat fraud. On the one hand, the State has failed to identify even a single individual who has ever been charged with committing in-person voter fraud in North Carolina. On the other, the General Assembly did have evidence of alleged cases of mail- in absentee voter fraud. Notably, the legislature also had evidence that absentee voting was not disproportionately used by African Americans; indeed, whites disproportionately used absentee voting. The General Assembly then exempted absentee voting from the photo ID requirement.

Speaking in Virginia twelve days later, Trump was clear in his support for voter disenfranchisment, remarking

You know, and I just left a great place, North Carolina. And they just had a tremendous loss. Voter ID. Voter ID. They lost voter ID. How do you lose voter ID? You mean, you don’t have to show identification? You don’t have to show that — hey?

Hey? Hey, voter identification fraud is nearly nonexistent, Donald:

Requirement of voter identification is a great way of depressing the vote, and waiting times at polling places varies significantly among ethinic groups, as indicated by the chart below:

In recognizing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Senator Barbara Boxer in 2003 wrote "Without a meaningful vote, there can be no equality before the law, no equal access, no equal opportunity." Donald Trump may buck his Party in varied and superficial ways and plead for votes of African-Americans. But promoting voter suppression, as he and his Party are most anxious to do, make clear that Donald Trump's GOP has little interest in the black community.








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Most Lives (Maybe) Matter

New York Times Senior Staff Editor Daniel Victor made  a lot of sense when a month ago he explained

Those in the Black Lives Matter movement say black people are in immediate danger and need immediate attention, like the broken bone or house on fire.

Saying “All Lives Matter” in response would suggest to them that all people are in equal danger, invalidating the specific concerns of black people.

“You’re watering the house that’s not burning, but you’re choosing to leave the house that’s burning unattended,” said Allen Kwabena Frimpong, an organizer for the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter. “It’s irresponsible.”

More to the point: It is a given that all lives matter, said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an assistant professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University.

“That has always been an assumption,” she said. “The entire point of Black Lives Matter is to illustrate the extent to which black lives have not mattered in this country.”

Judith Butler, a professor in the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley, saidin a 2015 interview that “if we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, ‘all lives matter,’ then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of ‘all lives.’ ”

Oddly enough, Glenn Beck (Glenn Beck!) makes a similar point when he remarks

All of us are sitting around a table, and we're all friends. It's time for dessert, and everybody gets pie except for me and you. And you say, ‘I didn’t get any pie.’ Everybody at the table looks at you and says ‘I know. All pie matters.’ You say, ‘But I don't have any pie! What about my pie?’









It all sounds so reasonable. White lives always have mattered in the USA and now black lives must matter, too.   To their credit, Black Lives Matter has now clarified its message as The Washington Post reports

Dozens of Black Lives Matter organizations jointly released a wide-ranging platform Monday spelling out standpoints on dozens of issues.

On almost all of the issues — including education, food insecurity, criminal sentencing and policing — progressive Jewish groups heartily agree. But the new platform’s stance on Israel has angered major Jewish organizations.

The platform calls for an end to U.S. federal aid for Israel. By providing aid, the platform argues, the United States is “complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.” Criticizing the construction of Israeli settlements in Palestinian areas and the arrest of young Palestinians, it describes Israel as “an apartheid state.”

One individual, the Times' Victor had noted, had tweeted Dear #AllLivesMatter types... imagine the word "too" appended to #BlackLivesMatter - get it now?

Oh, yes. We all "get it now." Black Lives matter. All lives matter. As for Jewish lives, well, that's another story entirely.








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Rudy Still Rudy

Slate's Jeremy Stahl believes Rudy Giuliani is getting a bad rap from "some hyperventilating on Twitter from outlets saying that Giuliani was ignoring 9/11."    Stating "his phrasing was misleading," the ex-mayor  "did not rewrite history to delete the worst foreign attack on U.S. soil since the War of 1812."

Stahl argues Giuliani

credited (vice-presidential nominee and former U.S. Representative) Pence’s work on the Patriot Act with preventing more attacks before pivoting to his remarks about eight years without another attack. Giuliani clearly meant there wasn't an attack during the 2001–2009 period after 9/11 and not the entirety of the eight years before Obama took office. Again, this was a poorly worded, misleading statement, but Giuliani clearly did not literally mean that 9/11 didn’t happen.

For whatever reason, media outlets reporting the remark as a gaffe have avoided replaying the remark in its context. So, too, has Stahl avoided that context, although it's easier to understand why he has done so. But as sportscaster Werner Wolf often put it, "let's go to the videotape," in this case the YouTube video below in which the ex-mayor is seen remarking

Mike Pence understands this from his time both as the Foreign Affairs Committee, both on the Foreign Affairs Committee, from his very timely visit which I remember to Ground Zero when we were in desperate need of help he was there  and from his work on the Judiciary Committee where he helped fashion the Patriot Act.  By the way, under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have a successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States. They all started when [Hillary] Clinton and Obama got into office.







If Giuliani had been crediting primarily Representative Mike Pence rather than President George W. Bush with preventing a terrorist attack, he wouldn't have said "by the way" and "before Obama came along." Giuliani was clearly attributing the absence of in an eight year (not "seven-and-a-half years" or "7+ years") to the Oval Office.

No one believes that the mayor of New York City on 9/11/01 (who did a lousy job both preparing the city for the possibility of a dramatic terrorist attack and managing the aftermath) forgot the events of 9/11; any such reference obviously is meant to be ironic.   There is a reason Senator Biden once quipped "I mean, think about it! Rudy Giuliani. There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There’s nothing else! There’s nothing else!”








For most, failure is nothing to brag about; Hillary Clinton does not go on about her e-mail savvy.  But similar discretion never stopped Rudy Giuliani from working tirelessly to capitalize on the worst attack in United States history for his own political gain.  He never forgot the events of 15 years ago but is only doing what he does best:  manipulating pain for gain. It's the same old Rudy.

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Never A Mandate

The relation between President Obama's words and Hillary Clinton's campaign is not immediately clear but is real nonetheless.

Steve M. quotes The New York Times quoting Robert Reich saying of Hillary Clinton "If she’s going to get anything done as president, she is going to have to have a mandate.”   Recognizing that Democrats are best served by running up the score and thereby possibly winning a congressional majority, SM. explains

if Republicans don't have this excuse for blocking all her initiatives, they'll found some other excuse. They'll say they held the House and Senate, or held the House and nearly held the Senate, therefore Americans voted for divided government, and want them to be a check on her radical socialist big-government policies. Or they'll just do what they did in 2009 and 2010: they'll block everything just because they can, and offer no explanation, or say, as they said with Obama, that Clinton campaigned as a healer and then decided to govern as an ideologue, even if this is blatantly contrary to the evidence....

Republicans will never, ever grant that Clinton has a mandate. If the candidate had been Sanders and he'd won in a blowout with an unabashedly ideological, issue-oriented campaign, they wouldn't have granted that he had a mandate. They just don't do that. No election outcome will prevent them from standing athwart history yelling "Stop."

That's a pretty safe bet.  Republicans simply have no reason not to say "no!" to President Clinton's modest proposals, propose a radical, extremist agenda in response, then wait for the mainstream media to demand a compromise.   We know that. We've had eight years observing it.

But Steve M. fails to acknowledge that Obama never did claim a mandate.  Consider Barack Obama's inaugural address in 2008, when, feeling the bipartisan spirit, he declared "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works."

Upon accepting the Democratic nomination for President in 1988, Michael Dukakis had stated "This election isn't about ideology; it's about competence" and once he lost, we all laughed. When Obama rephrased it in 2008, we applauded. However, a week before Obama's second inaugural address, The Nation's John Nichols wrote

After a 2012 election campaign that his Republican foes portrayed as a referendum on the role of government, Obama has a mandate to make government work again for the American people. His inaugural address should claim that mandate with all the passion and all the determination that FDR brought to the mission seventy-six years ago.

The President responded with

Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life. It does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.    

That was weak tea, steeped for about 20 seconds, and an acknowledgment that we do not have "to agree on every contour of life" could have served as a metaphor for a pragmatic, centist president who chose not to claim a mandate.

Steve M. probably is right that Hillary Clinton, even if she were to win in a landslide, could not claim a mandate Republicans wouldn't disregard and ignore. It is, nonethless, speculation, for we don't have recent experience with a Democrat claiming a mandate. We have only one who elected not to impose any but the most modest reforms on a nation, and progressive allies who barely raised a peep of protest.

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Everybody Plays The Fool

Lacking grammatical skill but resplendent in musical talent, young Concetta Rosa Marie Franconero of Newark, NJ once sang "there are no exceptions to the rule. Yes, everybody's somebody's fool." Thirty-one years later, for New Orleans' Aaron Neville it was "everybody plays the fool; no exception to the rule."







As in love, so, too, in sports do most of us play the fool at some time. For the Philadelphia Daily News' Will Bunch, it is now, and it is the Olympics.  Bunch argues that the success of American athletes in

Rio has reminded us about something that might even be more politically harmful for Trump's November prospects: That his portrayal of the U.S. as a nation of losers who can't do anything right is utterly ridiculous. It's 180 degrees from what voters want to hear, and what we want to believe about our nation and ourselves. And there's still 10 more nights of this new American morning -- a sports sunrise that could be twilight for Trump's dark ambition.

Admittedly, refutation in Rio that  the USA is "a nation of losers who can't do anything right is utterly ridiculous" cannot be good news for Grump.

Nonetheless, voters deserve more credit than Bunch is willing to give them because they recognize that athletic success does not signify a nation on the right track, nor that it will do anything to put the USA onto the right track.  As Americans were snapping up Olympic gold in Rio

The black man whose killing by police touched off an outbreak of arson and rock-throwing in Milwaukee was shot by a black officer after turning toward him with a gun in his hand, the police chief said Sunday.

The chief and the mayor gave the account as Wisconsin's governor put the National Guard on standby in case of another round of violence like the one that rocked Milwaukee's mostly black north side Saturday night.

Police Chief Edward Flynn cautioned that the shooting was still under investigation and authorities were awaiting autopsy results, but it "certainly appeared to be within lawful bounds."

Details of the shooting have not yet been confirmed and we have learned that things aren't always as we first assume. Yet whether this is suggestive of the proliferation of firearms in the nation or the disproportionate amount of street crime committed by young black men, or another case of unjustified killing of a black man by a police officer, it is not good. It was, further, compounded by what the journalist reported as "an outbreak of arson and rock-throwing," sometimes referred to as a "riot."

This, too, was not good.  And though crime has been dropping for a couple of decades, guns have long been part of a deadly American subculture, and most police officers remain dedicated, hard-working, and fair-minded, people have grown increasingly concerned about violence in the "homeland."

The optics, at least, are terrible and have persuaded Donald Trump to grab the mantle of the "law and order candidate."  By contrast, as Bunch enthuses, the optics of winning at the Olympics are really great.

We overreact to either one, however, at our peril.  Bunch is absolutely giddy about the "10 more nights of this new American morning -- a sports sunrise that could be twilight for Trump's dark ambition."   But as someone who recalls President Reagan's mythical- yet powerfully effective- "morning in America," he should know better than to vest such faith in the redemptive power of sports.  Reagan's "morning in America" con allowed him to lead the middle class on its ongoing, 30+ year descent.   Victory! in Rio won't end housing segregation or extraordinary poverty in Milwaukee, nor the divide betweeen law enforcement and the community in 49 other states.

Everybody does play the fool. The excellent, here exultant, Will Bunch has proven he is no exception.

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