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Fear Thy Neighbor

“I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border, do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.” [Vice President Kamala Harris, June, 2021]

The U.S. has spoken. Is anybody listening?  We have already seen that prospects for a sane and humane solution to the border controversy aren’t on the agenda of the new administration. Failure seems to be bi-partisan. In  one term, Joe Biden deported more immigrants than Trump did in his first term. Kamala Harris, when she was the democratic presidential campaign, doubled down on Republican talking points praising a bill (never passed) to authorize $650 million to continue building Trump’s border wall.

On the campaign trail, Trump, at his most bellicose, announced — “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals [undocumented immigrants] in the history of America.”

After a trip to the grocery store, particularly if you bought eggs, you might be wondering why people would risk their lives to come to the U.S. The mainstream media has the answer — The range of reasons why people move to the US from different parts of the world… Some are seeking economic opportunities. Others are fleeing violence, persecution or climate disasters. [CNN, April 15, 2023]— But who is to blame for all this misery? According to the mainstream media, if it’s not the immigrants themselves, it’s the failure of their leaders (most of them hard liners installed by the US).

No mention of the part the U.S. empire plays in the life-or-death struggles to reach the border. You won’t hear the truth from the former vice-president (or the present one for that matter), not President Trump or the media folk. The U.S. has a sordid history of intervention in and destabilization of Central America starting almost from the moment the empire came into being.

It started in 1823 when James Monroe, the fifth U.S. president and his plutocrat buddies decided they owned the entire American continent. The Monroe Doctrine, which survives to this day, warned former colonizers, the European powers, that there was a new sheriff in town. South America would henceforth be considered the U.S. back yard.  No more take-overs by outside forces. The U.S. was bent on endless self-enrichment.

The CIA is the US advance man organizing invasions and coups in Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia  and Venezuela to name their most egregious operations. These coups replace democratically elected governments with dictators, usually military strong men. The people are the big losers. Austerity is the new normal, social programs get the axe. Economic inequality is rampant as the rich get richer and poverty increases. Desperation sets in and people take to what they decide are greener pastures. Can you blame them for believing it lies across the border?

Not surprisingly, two of the countries whose governments were targeted by U.S.-supported coup d’etats have the highest rates of people trying to immigrate to the U.S. Decades ago the US toppled a democratically elected government in Guatemala and set off a series of civil wars which to this day has led to endless misery in the lives and fortunes of its people. In 2022, 675,000 undocumented Guatemalans crossed the border into the U.S.

Venezuela is another country that has suffered mightily from US efforts to effect regime change. Ten years ago, Barack Obama slapped punishing sanctions on Venezuela aimed at their economy. As per usual, the people were the losers. In 2016, President Trump tried to replace democratically elected President Maduro by naming an “interim president.” He also put a $15 million bounty on Maduro’s head. Biden continued the vicious assault. His Secretary of State announced “[the U.S.] does not recognize Nicholas Maduro as the president of Venezuela.” Biden one-upped Trump by raising the bounty on Maduro to $25 million. As a result, the U.S. must take “credit” for 82% of Venezuelans living in poverty, 53% in extreme poverty. Disease and death are rampant. The U.K. also has blood on its hands. True to its reputation as a U.S, lap dog, the U.K has frozen $1.95 billion of Venezuelan gold reserves in its central bank.

The evil genius of the U.S. is boundless. Even though Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, U.S. sanctions have cut a crater-sized hole in its oil exports which are 95% of its revenues. From being one of the most prosperous countries in South America it has become one of the poorest. In 2022, 270,000 Venezuelans fled their decimated country and entered the US as undocumented immigrants.

Perhaps the saddest story of all is what happened to America’s neighbor, Mexico, with whom it shares a one-thousand-mile border. It’s the Bad Neighbor policy on steroids. This tale of horrors dates back to the nineteenth century when the U.S. stole over half of Mexico and created the states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming. In the early part of the twentieth century, the U.S. Congress passed a series of immigration acts which wreaked further havoc. One was especially cruel forcing the repatriation (expulsion and deportation) of 300,000 to 2 million Mexicans who lived in the U.S. Unbelievably over half were American citizens.

The worst was yet to come. In 1954 one of America’s war criminal presidents, Eisenhower, hauled out Operation Wetback. That’s right a nice touch of racism to add to the shameful proceedings. Operation Wetback used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century and some were American citizens, Operation Wetback sent them back to Mexico.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. A bi-partisan screwing was next on the U.S. imperial agenda: the War on Drugs and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). The War on Drugs was President’s Nixon’s (R) nifty idea. Nixon declared drugs to be “public enemy number one” giving him the excuse to dump a massive amount of money into militarizing the Mexican border (not the Canadian border) and throwing in a miniscule bit of funding for drug treatment programs. Everyone agrees 50 years later that like all the shooting wars the US has fought and lost, this one too has been an abysmal failure creating sky high rates of violence among emboldened drug cartels, but not stopping or even slowing the drug trade. The War on Drugs was used as a way to steal valuable Latin American farmlands and resource-rich areas, criminalize the indigenous population living there, make way for wealthy American capitalists to move in.  Where dirty dealings are afoot, count in the CIA. In 1998, the CIA’s own Inspector General concluded that the CIA was aware of and ignored the drug smuggling operation allowing drug cartels to blanket Los Angeles with crack cocaine setting off the “crack epidemic” of the 1980s.

Count on “I feel your pain” Clinton (D) to inflict more pain on Latin America. As his contribution to the U.S. bad neighbor policy, he created the world’s largest free trade zone between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. It was meant to reward corporate thugs (mostly his campaign donors) whose “generosity” catapulted him into the White House. The Mexican people were collateral damage.  Job losses in agriculture and mining soared. Millions of Mexicans were forced off the land and into U.S-run sweatshops in the cities. With no check on their labor practices, unions being excluded, U.S. employers paid starvation level wages.

America being America, its own people didn’t escape the effects of this ruinous policy. “You implement NAFTA, the Mexican trade agreement, where they pay people a dollar an hour, have no health care, no retirement, no pollution controls and you’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country.” [Ross Perot, libertarian presidential candidate in 1992]. He was right. The U.S. lost upwards of 850,000 jobs from 1993-2013. Jobs losses and the decline of workers’ wages in both countries devastated families and whole communities.

Desperate people make desperate choices. From 1993, the year before NAFTA to 2000, annual immigration from Mexico increased from 370,000 to 770,000. With annual immigration on the rise, the total number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in the United States increased from about 2.9 million in 1995 to 4.5 million in 2000. The upward trajectory has continued.  By July of 2023 11.7 undocumented (the left-leaning media prefers to call them “unauthorized) immigrants were in the U.S.  Four million (37%) come from Mexico.

What does the U.S. do now? President Trump has promised to extend Biden’s recent get-tough policy on immigrants. By January 23, three days after his inauguration 1,000 immigrants had been rounded up and were headed for deportation. His future plans include restoring the “remain in Mexico” policy, end “catch and release, invade” sanctuary cities, including schools and churches, declare a state of emergency allowing federal troops to mass at the border and declare drug runners “terrorists.” In a final irony, Trump has announced that he will cut off all U.S, aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador which after Mexico are the leading countries of origin for undocumented immigrants. How do you think that will work?

How about the U.S. boasting about its generosity to poor nations? In reality the U.S. is very miserly when it comes to doling out money to its neighbors. All the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (with the exception of Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia who get zero) split $2.5 billion in US foreign aid. Not nearly enough to restore the damage U.S. interference has caused the people of Latin and Central America. Quite the reverse, U.S. foreign aid is directed towards shoring up the rule of military dictators and comes with massive strings attached. Little of it goes to humanitarian assistance. In an ironic twist, U.S. “generosity” often results in conflicts and violence promoting migration rather than stemming it.

It’s a different story when Israel and Ukraine come calling.  Between 2022-2024 Ukraine, considered the most corrupt country in Europe, has been gifted with $183 billion in foreign aid. Israel is a perennial beneficiary of taxpayer largesse. In one year from October 2023 to October 2023, the U.S. spent $17.9 becoming Israel’s partner in the war crime of genocide. [Cost of War Project, Brown University] Two countries thousands of miles away that have little or no strategic value to the U.S. are the recipients of $200 billion taxpayer dollars while the U.S. starves the neighbors it has pauperized and creates a major problem for itself.

Will the new President solve the immigration problem with his tough guy, take no prisoners approach? The U.S, has been down this road before. With little success. What do you think are the chances for success this time around?

Looking for the American Dream

It must be around here somewhere. Doesn’t it strike you as bizarre that America’s leaders always seem to be looking for something that doesn’t exist, that they know doesn’t exist, but they keep looking for anyway, especially when election time rolls around.

Notable examples proliferate but one stands out. Its 2004 and the U.S. has just finished destroying Iraq, a country that posed absolutely no threat to the U.S. and once had the second largest economy in the Arab world. In 2003, claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (it didn’t), the US invaded Iraq, killing over 200,000 Iraqi civilians while displacing 9.2 million. 4,400 American soldiers came home in body bags and 32,000 were wounded many grievously, casualties of a lie that destroyed a country.

Not everyone was horrified by the slaughter and mayhem. In 2004 at a black-tie dinner for the national press corps, President Bush narrated a skit about the fruitless search for WMDs in Iraq (fruitless because there weren’t any). Bush looked behind furniture in the Oval Office — “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere.” Looking somewhere else — “No, no weapons over there.” It mercifully ended after several more unfunny scenarios.

You know who thought it was hilarious? The journalists who populate the U.S. mainstream media. Imagine their dismay when they awoke the next morning to find that the entire world deplored and disdained their shocking lack of feeling for the carnage and death of innocents the US had caused. The best they could hope was that they like the WMDs had not been outed by the cameras.

It’s two decades later and the U.S. is on the hunt again — this time looking for the American Dream which a whole slew of politicians and rich folk tell the 99% that’s what they’re living in. In case you didn’t get the memo, the American Dream is an ironclad guarantee that all Americans have the opportunity to succeed and improve their lives.

That’s why we’re looking for it. Despite the fact that the American leadership hierarchy has always been rife with virtual gangsters living in the lap of luxury in their tidy sinecures of big economics (location of corporate looting which has gone since the founding) and big tech, big education, big healthcare (new entries in the gangster capitalism sweepstakes). The American Dream has been fighting for its survival for decades, if not centuries. Over one hundred years ago, President Woodrow Wilson (he was the one who campaigned on the promise to keep us out of war, then began the presidential tradition of embroiling U.S. soldiers in devastating wars after his election, this time WWI) was dragged, undoubtedly kicking and screaming, to that realization: “The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly.”

More recently in 2008 when Senator Charles Grassley (fancy that, a Republican) tried to increase taxes on private equity firms (which control $6 trillion in assets) from a measly 15% to a slightly less measly 35%, he was stymied when Blackstone (the world’s largest PE firm) poured $9 million into lobbying congress. No doubt about it, the American Dream is becoming harder to find as politicians get richer.

Let’s ask the 99%. Is the American Dream is working for them?  Seems we don’t have a lot of happy campers out there. In a New York Times poll taken right before the election, 45% of Americans said the economy was not working for them. Considering that the average American blue-collar worker is the victim of wage stagnation making virtually the same as a worker made 50 years ago and in the same 50 years $50 trillion dollars changed hands — from the bottom 90% to the top 1% — it’s hardly shocking.

When all else fails, we can count on the future. Can’t we? A new administration headed by what passes for a member of a different party (although speculation abounds that there’s only one party in the U.S. with two wings) Hardly an encouraging sign that the president elect’s cabinet is stuffed with —you guessed it — billionaires. It turns out he, his vice-president, cabinet nominees and his transition team are worth $613 billion. More bad news. America’s 815 billionaires added $280 billion to their already bloated wallets in the week after the election? Whose American Dream is it really?

Wait a minute. I may have found it. Aren’t the politicians, usually on the campaign trail, always telling us that healthcare is a human right? How better to improve your life than to have good healthcare? The state of U.S. healthcare today makes it clear that as usual the U.S. does not practice what it preaches— “The US is failing one of its principal obligations as a nation: to protect the health and welfare of its people…The status quo—continually spending the most and getting the least for our health care dollars—is not sustainable...Too many Americans are living shorter, sicker lives because of this failure.” [Commonwealth Fund] Affordability and availability of medical care, two imperatives of the Dream have gone missing. Maybe that’s why Americans have the shortest life expectancy among wealthy nations. The entire U.S. healthcare system is awash with profiteers who get fabulously wealthy trading on the sickness and suffering of sick Americans. One example should suffice. Nine drug company executives became billionaires during the pandemic as a result of their monopolies on COVID vaccines. Despite a number of eminent virologists crusading for the use of cheaper, possibly more effective remedies, the fix was in and big pharma maintained its hold on pandemic remedies.  How life-saving were big pharma’s remedies? Over one million Americans died during the pandemic.

It seems that the American Dream like so much else in America is reserved for the 815 U.S. billionaires and the rest of the 0.1%. For them, healthcare is their American Dream.

In our thus far fruitless search for the American dream, perhaps we should pay attention to U.S. leaders who claim they know where it’s located. The president elect knows or at least he knew in 2016: Trump — “We want the American Dream. We want to own our own home” Gotcha. At last, we found it. No doubt about it, home ownership must be the key to the American dream. But there’s a fly in this particular ointment. The top 1% of the US population owns around 2/3 of the country’s privately held land [US Department of Agriculture] That leaves a puny one-third for the 99%. Not American Dream territory unless you belong to the 1% club.

Looking high and low for the American Dream has yielded no results. Maybe in education? Oops. The US education system compares unfavorably with other wealthy countries, failing to make it it into the top ten highest ranked education systems. Doesn’t sound too dreamlike, does it? Could it be that America’s failure to have a first-class education system stems from a lack of equal access especially for students in the bottom 50% of the population. How do you create an education system which gives all students equal access to excellence in a country that is number in the world for its wealth and income inequality? The simple answer is you don’t.

We may have exhausted the possibilities. Economic access? Nope not there. Healthcare? Definitely not there. Home ownership. You gotta be kidding me. What about the president elect? Will he make a difference? Judging by his cabinet picks —billionaires as far as the eye can see the American Dream is DOA. “They’ve [the president and his cabinet picks] have already announced plans…to further enrich large corporations and wealthy elites…while advocating for cuts to vital programs that working and middle-class Americans depend on.” [David Kass, Americans for Tax Fairness]

Maybe George knows where the American Dream is hiding. Although come to think of it he didn’t have much luck with WMDs.

For most of us, the result on November 5 was a real shocker. Despite what the polls predicted, American voters, 66% of those eligible to vote, trooped to the polls and pronounced the verdict: throw the bums out. And they did. Giving a thumbs down to the whole team which dashed the hopes of the sitting vice-president Kamala Harris. Let’s start with the bottom line. Donald Trump received the most votes (76.5 million vs 74 million for Harris), beating Kamala handily in 31 states including all 7 swing states. Adding to the catastrophic defeat at the top of the ticket, the Democrats saw Republicans make inroads not only in traditionally red states, but reliably blue ones as well. Take New York state, blue to its core, in 2020 Trump received 37% of the vote while Joe Biden captured 61%. No surprises there. But look what happened this year. Trump walked away with 44% of the vote, a 7% increase while Harris at 56% lost 5% of Biden’s stash.

So far we’ve been looking at the voters who actually went to the polls and voted. What about that tranche of eligible Americans who stayed home or went fishing in 2024 after voting in 2020. How did that work out for Harris? Judge for yourself. In 2020, Biden ended up with 81 million votes according to “certified” results. In 2024 Harris only pulled in 74 million votes. 7 million less than Biden. Did all those democratic votes go to Trump? In 2020 Trump received 74 million votes. While in 2024, he received 76 million votes, only 2 million more. That leaves 5 million democratic votes recorded in 2020 but MIA in 2024.

There are two alternate theories for what happened to 5 million democratic votes between 2020 and 2024. For conspiracy theorists, did Joe Biden really get the 81 million votes the bean counters in Washington reported? A more realistic view would probably point in another direction. There were 2 million democratic voters who “held their noses” and voted for Trump. The remaining 5 million who voted for Biden in 2020 and were sorely disappointed by Harris didn’t vote for either candidate.

How to explain such a reversal? President Reagan had the answer. One simple question that drove Jimmy Carter out of the White House in 1980. On campaign stops, Ronald Reagan would ask the crowd—”Are you better off than you were 4 years ago“? Then as now, the overwhelming response was: Hell no.

When it comes to simple but successful messaging, Bill Clinton’s rode “It’s the economy stupid” into two terms in the White House. Pollsters claim that Americans decide who to vote for in the grocery store when they’re standing in the check-out line. Why is that important?

In 2023 over 50% of the 120 million households in America, had an annual household income that was less than $75,000. For them going to the grocery store has become a hair-raising experience. The prices of staples like milk, eggs and butter have skyrocketed. Worse still “shrinkflation” has left hapless shoppers shaking their heads. Ever reach for a 5-pound bag of sugar and find that it’s only 4 pounds. What hasn’t changed is the price.

Since inflation has taken a big chunk out of take-home pay, millions of Americans reach for their high-interest credit card. But wait credit card interest rates have risen 40% since 2021. The Biden/Harris administration ushered in rate hikes on most of the services U.S. households have come to rely on. Interest rates on mortgages up 114%, student loan interest rates almost doubled from 4% to 7%, energy prices soared out of sight and state and local tax hikes have put a further strain on household budgets. U.S. consumers are in a sour mood as they watch their debt loads increase. Household debt currently is an eye-popping 17.94 trillion. [Federal Bank of New York] What they probably didn’t want to hear was a democratic convention and its presidential candidate proclaiming joyful times ahead absent the policies to make it happen.

American voters expect all candidates for elected offices, especially presidents, to make promises, the more extravagant the better. And Trump didn’t let them down. How about his promise to end the Ukrainian war in 24 hours or to deport millions of undocumented immigrants on day one. When Trump doesn’t end the war or deport millions on day one will that hurt his popularity? Aside from a few mainstream media pundits who will tut, tut over it, the vast majority of voters won’t remember and won’t care. That’s how it goes. The same voters who demand promises seldom if ever hold it against the victors when they fail to deliver. Even Joe Biden made promises from his basement in 2020. He promised to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour and he promised a public option in Obamacare. After he was elected, both promises disappeared down the black hole where presidential campaign promises go never to be seen again. Kamala’s made a few unconvincing promises —something she called the “opportunity economy.” Most Americans were unimpressed, preferring a few more dollars in their paychecks.

Two other promises — a $6,000 tax credit for newborns only and a $25,000 subsidy for first time home buyers only — never caught on with the electorate. If your kid is older than his birth or you’re on your second home buy, Kamala has nothing to offer you.

On two foreign policy issues that have dogged the Biden/Harris administration, Harris showed the same resistance to the demands of the electorate: she failed to convince even her base much less republicans that she had a solution to the Ukraine disaster. Instead, when she did mention it, she echoed the Biden administration’s failed policy — “[I] will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.” Trouble is 66% of all Americans want the U.S. to back down, force a peace treaty on Ukraine immediately and then in America’s time-honored tradition — vamoose. On the subject of Israel’s brutal war, the best she could do was to repeat the Biden fairy tale that Israel had a right to defend itself. Nor would she promise to stop sending weapons to Israel. Instead, voters heard statements that sounded like thin gruel — “I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza.” As if daring three quarters of her own party who “express a negative view of Israel’s actions [pollster lingo for butt out America]” along with 60% of independents to challenge her. Which they did in droves by either not voting or voting for Trump.

One thing for sure: it was the economy that doomed the democrats. Look no further than Trump snagging a majority of working-class voters. They became outliers in a democrat party that pledges its allegiance to suburban women, LBGTQ voters, professionals and college graduates — the new “rock stars” in the democratic firmament.

Sound familiar? Here’s how the big poobahs in the democrat party thought they had the winning strategy for Hillary Clinton in 2016. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”[Chuck Schumer, Senate Majority leader] Nice try, Chuck, how did that work in 2016, same way it worked out in 2024.

The mood of Americans as November 5 hove into view probably tells us all we need to know about the results — on that day 3/4 of voters were downright angry and dissatisfied about the direction of the country, one half strongly disapproved of Biden and 46% said they were worse off in the last four years than voters in all previous exit poll have reported. Who can blame them. Harris was joined at the hip to an administration blamed for a widespread cost of living crisis in housing, healthcare and child care, two intractable wars costing U.S. taxpayers billions, an increasing immigration crisis. The mystery is not why Harris lost but how in the world she managed to snag 74 million votes.

The best obituary on the democratic 2024 catastrophe came from Bernie Sanders albeit eight years too late: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Trump may have won and Harris lost but think about it, the real losers are the American people. Promises made, promises broken. It’s the tale of every election since 1945. Whoever makes the most convincing promises wins. As history teaches us — when the winner walks into the Oval Office, the promises fly out the window.

Voters wanted change. And something did change — the other arm of the war party took over. What didn’t change was the misery: a healthcare system that excels in only one thing —making money, a financial system controlled by billionaires, an energy sector whose middle name is price-gouging and who despite record profits still receives an annual $15 billion taxpayer-funded subsidy (in 2020 Biden handed over an additional $15 billion in federal relief; why not they’re owned by Wall Street, one of Biden’s major donor) let’s not forget to add to this list of federally-endorsed giveaways the growing intrusiveness of the government in alliance with private tech companies like Google and Facebook and a myriad of others intent on eliminating privacy along with free speech and other constitutional guarantees.

What we do know is that Trump won and Harris lost. What many Americans don’t know yet is that as the democratic clown car moves out and the republican clown car moves in, the commitment to business as usual remains steadfast regardless of which party wins. The billionaires who fund the candidates will decide. Count on it. For the people it’s just another day in a high-class banana republic.