Donald Trump, Jr. likes to “brag”
about his “superior” genes, although it should be noted that like his father,
he was born into wealth and has never worked an honest day in his life. Like
his father, he believes the world is divided into “winners” and “losers”; there
is no “compromise” on that, and as we have seen with Trump’s rhetoric via
twitter, white “losers” are thrown the red meat of racism to distract them from
this. The Trump family hostility toward reality is perhaps best summed by Trump
2’s recent comments to CNBA India, which has received little mainstream media
attention despite what it reveals about the Trumps:
I think there is something about the spirit of the Indian people that
is unique here to other parts of the emerging world. You go through a town, and
I don’t mean to be glib about it, but you can see the poorest of the poor and
there is still a smile on a face.
Maybe it isn’t true that Melania
Trump (who has got to be the most indifferent, least accessible First Lady in
recent memory) employed an “exorcist” to rid the White House of the black
“demons” of Obama before she would step foot into the White House (although her
denial of it is tepid rather than outraged), but the above statement shows that
the Trumps are conscious of “class” and that people should know their “place”
in society and accept it. These people Trump 2 is referring to were born into a
“caste” that they have little or no opportunity to escape from; perhaps they
are “smiling” because it is the only “happy” thing left to do in their otherwise
sad lives. Perhaps they would be laughing instead if Trump 2 had stepped into a
steaming hot pile of human waste during his visit to India to promote the family “brand.”
Maybe Trump 2 has “nice” things to say about the “poorest of the poor” in India
because unlike Mexican immigrants who come to this country, they have no
apparent desire to improve their lives—and Indians from other castes are as
happy as Trump 2 to maintain that status quo.
Meanwhile, we learn that Senator
Tom Cotton—you know, one of the two anti-immigrant senators (David Perdue the
other) who put the “shit” into Trump’s “hole”—believes that the U.S. doesn’t
need any more immigrants because “robots” will eventually do most of the work
that humans currently do. I am reminded of an old Mad magazine satire of a world where humans no longer have to work,
and eventually “evolve” into adult-sized “hopity-hop” balls with useless
appendages. Economists are quick to point out that right now the U.S. economy
is lagging because it can’t fill 6 million
open job positions—the majority of them “low-skill”—and this is likely to get
worse because of aging demographics.
Even with more automation, as a
recent Washington Post story by
Heather Long noted, there is a tendency that it actually creates more jobs than
it eliminates:
Companies shed workers during the Great Recession and rapidly tried to
cut costs, including by introducing more machines on assembly lines and in fast
casual restaurants like Panera, where you can now order on a touch screen. Yet
even with those trends, the U.S. economy has added more than 16.4 million jobs
since the low point for employment in December 2009. “Tom Cotton is woefully
misinformed,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. “Robots will create
more jobs.”
It was also noted that many
people are under the false impression that technology is such that robots will
be created that are virtually “super beings” that can out-do humans in any work
that involves the interaction of “mind” and “body” to do tasks that require
even just a smidgen of forethought and common sense:
We like to think of machines like the super-robots we know from movies
like “Transformers” that can do all that humans can do and then plenty more.
But the reality is that robots aren't nearly that sophisticated yet. “There's
something known as Moravec's paradox, which is the idea that it's much
easier for computers and AI to do high-skilled work like accounting than it is
to tell a computer to do low-skilled work like tidying up a room,” said Alex
Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute. “If that
remains true, there will be a lot more opportunities for low-skilled work.”
And they probably never will be
that “sophisticated.” After all, back in 1969 after the first moon landing,
most people thought it was just another “step” away from humans reaching Mars
and even Jupiter by 2001. The bigotry of
Trump, his “advisors” and many Republican lawmakers blinds them to these
economic and labor need realities. They only want “merit-based”—meaning
“high-skill”—low-wage foreign labor that essentially flouts the “dreams” of all
those American “dreamers” that Trump hypocritically used to deride DACA. But the
Trumps’ revealed their true selves once more when Trump 2 found delightful that
a country where being born into a “caste” is the difference between being the
“poorest of the poor” and unable to improve their “status,” and someone who takes
advantage of the opportunity of abuse of the H-1B visa program in this country,
which U.S. companies prefer to do when they when don’t want to take the time or
expense to hire an American.
However, this blatant “preference”
of a more “meritorious” immigrant group over another isn’t just the province of
the right-wing racists, but of so-called “progressives.” Take for instance the
cover story in this week’s Seattle Weekly,
which bemoans that 300,000 “high-skilled” Indians are waiting interminably for
green cards to stay permanently in the country. What they should be talking
about is the “Patel Motel Cartel,” the fact that most convenience stores are
owned by Indians because of deliberate discrimination against non-Indians—which
in turn leads to blatant hiring discrimination against non-Indians for what are
low-skill positions—or what may be a new “trend,” if what I observed
at a Burger King franchise in Kent constitutes one: All of the former employees
are gone, replaced by an all-Indian work force. Fast food franchises used to be
the last stop for high school kids and low-skill Americans to get a job; the
only “high-skill” I see in evidence here is the ability deny vulnerable Americans a low-skill job opportunity.
And oh by the way, Melania
Trump’s parents have just been "exposed" as the beneficiaries of “chain migration” the elimination of which is one of
Trump’s four “pillars.”
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