Immigration - a perfect Issue for the Repubs

With the all of the white-guys-on-parade-Repub candidates for Prez flailing around for a means to distance themselves from The Bush, immigration may be the ticket. Nativism runs deep in this country and Latino immigrants, legal and illegal, have now dispersed themselves through out country. So it is no longer simply a regional issue. Who has not gone to a Home Depot or a Lowes and seen all these dudes furtively hanging around (almost like they are selling something illegal) apparently waiting for work, quietly jabbering away in Espanol. TV commentator Lou Dobbs has made a career with his incessant tirades - agitating and exaggerating daily about our Broken Borders. Immigration is one of the few issues George W. Bush has taken a moderate position on and it has only exacerbated his sinking popularity with many Republicans.

With the Demos continuing to disappoint showing little zeal or political courage to steadfastly confront an out of control Imperial Presidency, the Repubs will be angling for an issue to recapture enough of the electorate to again weasel their way back into the Presidency (remember the voting machinery is still in the hands of many GOP state functionaries.) All the clap-trap about the inherent immorality of gays or the sanctity of life of unborn fetuses is starting to wear thin. Such issues no longer have the punch they once had. They need a new wedge. And Immigration with a capital "I" will do just fine. It is divisive enough; it is definitely emotive enough and it is something that George W. Bush actually had a moderate position on - one that they can disagree with and thus redefine themselves as non-Bushian Republicans.

Several categories of voters are vulnerable to the charms of the Repubs on the immigration issue. First of all, immigration is a splendid means to split off many from that portion of those who vote as "independents" or who only weakly identify with either party. This highly sought after pack of shallow thinking, non-committal bozos (whose perennial pursuit drives the Democrats to the right in every presidential election) is always fair game. Included here are what were once called Mugwamps (registered to one party but vote for the other.) This voting demographic tends to vote emotionally rather than rationally. Gun control leniency has elected many a Republican stalwart who has in turn enlisted in the very class war that will economically hurt the very same blue collar gun-aficionado who put in them in - shifting the tax burden on to middle classes, deregulation of the big corporations, pro-NAFTA neoliberalism on steroids, etc. And of course how many Republican voting evangelical Christians have suffered a full decade of a frozen minimum wage at their crummy Walmart jobs while waiting for the Rapture? Try as the Demos do, the Repubs, Karl Rove or no Karl Rove, are masters Pied Pipers at luring these poor saps over the hill and into the arms of their class enemies.

And then there are the many loyal Democrats who, although they despise Bush and his panoply of horrors, also resent the downward pressure on wages produced by the perceived hoards of "illegal immigrants", people who are used to getting for a full day's work for what they get in the USA in a single hour. Many voting Democrats are caught in vise of a seemingly low but relentless rate of inflation (officially 2.36% - can that be real?) and stagnant wages (which continues to lag behind productivity.) To most people the official inflation rate doesn't seem to capture the increasing spread between living expenses and take-home pay. Somehow housing costs, either rents or payments on recently taken out huge mortgages, don't seen to be reflected in the consumer price index (CPI.) Plus many people were seduced into buying gas gobbling, greenhouse gas spewing SUVs and giant pickup trucks in the last few years and now gas prices seems to be only going up. So the "illegal immigrants" whether directly responsible or not will make fine scapegoats for economic stress suffered by the middle and lower middle class voters. The party that can manipulate that frustration and resentment will get a bonanza of votes. Which party is the most intellectually dishonest and conniving? Which party is a virtuoso at getting people to vote against their own best interests?

And then of course there are Repub loyalists - the so-called the Republican Base. They now consist of two rather disparate categories. The first is the the old-line country club patrician ruling class type Republicans. From the small town, small fry Babbits to the Ivy League educated corporate elite (the real power behind the throne), these are the boys who run the show if they can - and they usually can. This group, while numerically small, is quintessentially influential out all proportion to their numbers controlling many institutions (universities, foundations, NGOs) and most importantly the media. Also paradoxically and probably what accounts for Bush's unpopular support for "amnesty for illegals", these guys own many of the factories and farms that now employ these "undocumented" interlopers. For these people it is all about economics - they really do enjoy the promised tax breaks and they enjoy the cheap labor. So they probably are of two minds on the issue. But when comes down to it they know their butter placement and their sides of bread. They really do benefit from privatization, deregulation, anti-union policies, off-shore production (and banking), anti-environmental policies, etc. -in short the whole neoliberal agenda.

The second component of the Republican Base couldn't have less in common with first part. They are the brain dead redneckian right wingers, many from the South, who always gravitate to that position that allows for the most hate, racism and bigotry to be manifested - the audience of Ann Coulter and Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, etc. This group is rather malleable. To some extent this demographic overlaps with the unaffiliated types cited above. This is essentially an amorphous group of under-educated, binary minded empty vessels that can be used by demagogues and rabblerousers of any ideology - they are the rabble. And (surprise, surprise) they seem to have gravitated to the right on the immigration issue. However, that energy can (and has been) redirected upward toward the upper classes, their real enemy.

The Democrats must come to terms with the so-called Globalization issue. It is international economic forces and damaged ecological systems that have increased this world wide migration rate as the poor are pushed off the land. Subsidized crop producing wealthy developed countries hypocritically and cynically force 'free market reforms' and privitization on underdeveloped countries. As their ag sectors are consolidated and industrialized to compete the excess rural population either winds up in festering slums that ring their overloaded cities, or they flee over the nearest border usually illegally to somewhere where things are relatively less desperate. The illegal immigrants are not freeloaders and opportunists nearly as much as the educated professionals graduates of state supported universities who gravitate legally to higher wage zones. This is commonly known as "brain drain" and it is accepted and encouraged. The travails of the poor on an overpopulated abused planet will not go away - billions live on less than $2.00 (US) a day. Whether they remain in their wretched hell hole festering Third World slums without clean water and have to endure stinking open sewers while living cardboard and tin shacks, or whether they flee over the border willing to work for peanuts, they will not go away.

Unless the Democrats begin to formulate a readily comprehensible analysis and back away from the excesses of the "no holds barred, pedal to the metal, 'free market' capitalism known as Neo-liberalism they will be ambushed by Republicans on the immigration issue. No way will the Democrats Party, a political party with sizable components of ex-immigrants (Mexicans- Americans) and descendants of slaves be able to match the reactionary, racist, Nativist policy that the Republican, no-nothing right can conjure up. The Republicans will come up with a harsh, unworkable but appealing demagogic approach and it will be very politically appealing to the constituency that it is aimed at.

The Democrats must counter with a bold plan of a green rebuilding of the country including luring more investment back into this country. A New Deal scale project using reprogrammed military-industrial monies needs to be envisioned. The Democrats must go where they have not gone since FDR. They must inflame passion and inspire creativity and hope. The people are ready for it. Are the Democrats?

BUSH AND THE MEDIA

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, they never stop thinking of ways to harm our country and neither do we" G. W. Bush

Yes, George W. Bush actually said that. If a Democratic president had misspoken so egregiously we would have never heard the end of it. It would have been broadcast and rebroadcast until it came out of our ears. The pundacracy, the right wing radio talk show hosts and the late night comediennes would have had a field day. For Fox and CNN it would have been Christmas, New Years Eve and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. Remember the hapless John Kerry, at that point still considering another run for Prez, and his inept joking reference to the relationship between guys stuck serving in Iraq and their educational accomplishments or lack thereof. He was skewered endlessly and hung out to dry for good. It ended his plans of running for Prez ever again (thank goodness.) But Bush, as was Reagan in the 80s, is given a pass on all verbal fuck-ups and (more importantly) his many full-on big black lies. The (non-Fox) news on TV, specifically CNN and PBS's Jim Lehrer News Hour, it is appallingly inadequate. They often subject the viewers to some miserable (unwatchable) clip of our El Presidente holding forth on some podium someplace or other. They then lets us take it at face value without much (or any) commentary. Sure he's the president but he is a certified fool. His utterances are always horseshit – prepackaged by his army of speech writers and his pack of Republican-fascist Neocon hacks he calls advisers. If what he says sounds scripted and stale, that is because it is. It is the same old predicable prevarication infested propaganda crafted to con, bamboozle and deceive that remaining hardcore 30% of Bushian true believers. No one but a hardcore of Bush-flavor Kool Aid drinkers now takes what he says seriously. Most people now knows he is a fucking liar - even Republicans! Yet even with his highly scripted presentations he screws up (as in the lead-in quote). But it is when he gets off-script and wriggles out of the clutches of his handlers that the real fun begins. The shallow, superficial, either-or minded real George W. Bush comes shinning through.

And he is a special embarrassment is on the international scene, when he goes abroad to flee from some domestic shit storm of his own making or for some major get-together of the biggies. The other heads of state, wily politicians who have had to gain their positions through skillful and cagey inter-party and intra-party struggle, must have to stifle revulsion and open disdain when interacting with this power-drunk fool. GW Bush didn't work his way up through some byzantine party apparatus, he was thrust into the apogee of power after serving a sort of internship as a governor of a corrupt Republican-controlled state. Then by devious Rovian machinations, “voter suppression” and a politicized Supreme Court (read two essentially 'rigged' elections) he was crowned President of the World (at least in his mind.) Recall the footage of 'The Bush 'coming up behind the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, at some formal international conference and trying to give her a so-called back rub which she interpreted as some lascivious sexist excuse to fondle her body. What a creep! What if Bill Clinton had done that? It would have been blown up into be an international incident of the first magnitude. Of course Clinton for all his 'Lotharioian' inclinations had more class than that.

Something has happened here and we must acknowledge it. We have slid into a very bad place and I don't trust the Democrats to get us out. Their performance so far with a majority in both houses of Congress (albeit by a razor thin margin in the Senate) has been disappointing. They still refuse to play hardball against the Repubs. The Repubs somehow are better at getting their way with a minority in both houses than the Demos can do with a majority in both house. What gives? The stakes are high; time is short. Most Americans have lost their patience. Every day that the Demos hold back from fulling confronting the GOP and its lame duck President the free fall continues. And it is one more day in which the Bush Combine rolls over and grinds into mulch more of our civil liberties, more of our hard won protections from corporate irresponsibility, and finally our very economic wellbeing. The rest of the world mainly the Japanese and Chinese will continue to bankroll us through loans (buying Treasury Bonds) for just so long. And ,of course, there is the selling off of our corporate assets which is happening at an alarming rate, the result the our serious trade imbalance.

Corporate ownership aside whether by foreign or domestic interests, everything we hold dear is being transformed into the profits of these modern day pirates - transnational corporations that are devoid of allegiance to any nation state or any standards of morality. The owners of controlling interest, the top managers and the boards of directors of these of these Dr. Frankenstein monsters, that perversely have all the rights of a private citizen but none of the responsibilities, are but a tiny elite. This small self-serving plutocratic world ruling class ,05% of the worlds population, controls if not outright owns most of the worlds wealth (and its media). This, to paraphrase Paul Simon from a song in the Graceland album, '..a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires' cooperate more than they compete, and only use nationalism as a fig leaf. And they are running things into the ground - and have been for a long time. That is how we ended up a George W. Bush. They (the plutocrats) now tacitly acknowledge (if not openly admit) that placing George W Bush into the US presidency was a monumental blunder and may do irreparable long term damage to their cause (we hope.) W. was seen by the ultra right wing of the ruling class, that has been in ascent since the 1980s, as a latter day Ronald Reagan. Reagan, their proud standard bearer, legacy holder and supposedly brave Soviet Union slaying hero, was longingly missed throughout the Clinton Era even as Clinton departed only minimally from the Reagan script. So they literally catapulted Bush II into the White House using all of the tried and proved tools of 21st Century media manipulation and state-of-the-art political advertising using a mix of pseudo libertarian “ free market”/anti tax dogma and an emotive wedge of the right wing religio-populist issues (guns, God and gays.) But in the end they were still forced to resort to literally stealing the election through blatant 'managing' of the the final vote count in key swing states – Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 (twice unchallenged by the servile media and the august Democratic Party.) And of course in 2000 there was the Supreme Court, chock full of Republican ideologues, there to tip the scale.

Unfortunately Bush is turning out, especially in his second term, to be a profound embarrassment and ever-widening disaster for the GOP. He vetoes bills that a sizable majority (including Republicans) are in favor of (stem cell research, Iraq troop draw down), he pushes an immigration plan that both the influential right and left wings of the GOP and Demos respectively revile (and so far have torpedoed), and of course his foreign policy is a fiasco of world historical proportions. We are entangled in not one but two wars that we are paying for on credit. All of the world-wide empathy and good will resulting from the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US has been dialectically reversed into world-wide antipathy to the US and its policies. The Middle East everyday descends further into a bloody cataclysm, especially the Iraq Quagmire that essentially is now a combination multi-front civil war/foreign occupation and Islamic jihadist recruiting machine. He is tearing asunder (which might not be that bad) the uniformed US military institutions. The officer corp if not in open revolt is retiring in droves, and recruiting shortages are so bad that troops are sent back repeatedly until they either get killed, maimed or (mercifully) their enlistment ends. And of course the National Guard is mis-deployed to Iraq to fill leaving huge gaps in established natural disaster response programs. And the sheer size of the government (and size of the deficit) continues to grow much to the alarm of the old line Republican base. In short it's a fucking mess! Much needed federal funds are spewing out uselessly in all directions mostly on tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires (who in turn do not invest it in local manufacturing facilities producing jobs) and on the endless wars (which are are costing like $10M an hour) and on hypothetical wars (like in space.) National health care has now moved to top of the agenda for the American public but there is now no money to pay for it, especially a single payer system like all other industrialized nation have. The hurricane leveled African-American sections of New Orleans continue to molder in neglect giving the world an ongoing object lesson in American Racism 101. And so it goes. No one is happy with W these 'daze.'

W appears quite insensitive to his situation. He continues in an aggressive high profile style to wallow in his imagined grandeur and artificial status. And in his embattled position on multiple fronts he has becomes ever more hidebound and obstreperous. He is never pragmatic and reasonable like Reagan (on arms control) or even Nixon (on China) sometimes could be. He his a bull in a china shop. Everything he touches he knocks off the shelf and breaks. He makes every presidential predecessor (no matter how demonstratively awful they may have actually been) look like brilliant statesman and golden hearted humanitarians. He is stubborn and pig headed and with rare exception usually gravitates to the worse possible solution to every problem. Then refusing to admit he has erred, he steadfastly goes down with the ship pulling the rest of us down with him like floating shipwreck survivors caught in the suction of a sinking vessel, as he has with Iraq. However one thing one we can say about George W. Bush he did make history. I just wish he would become history.