"Sarah Wingo didn’t want anything to do with cutting up the reptile, a long standing science project, and her parents signed a waiver asking her to be excused from the project.”
A frog, for crying out loud, is an amphibian. Maybe the reporter got her mom to write a letter asking that she be excused from learning anything about biology, since everyone knows that biology is evolution’s first cousin twice removed, and Charles Darwin was Satan’s mole, sent to Earth to trick Eve into eating the Apple, which she made flavorful by rubbing on Lot’s wife’s shin. Or something.
Illiterates.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
And the morons, they go round and round
Elnuestros doesn’t pretend to possess the kind of cojones that would enable him to strap himself into a modified stock car and drive it in a circle at 200 miles an hour, inches from cars in front and back and on each side. He would sniff his hanky and swoon were he ever confronted with such a manly challenge. He also would get bored out of his mind at the idea of doing that for, what? Five hundred miles? Are you nuts?
But as much as he admires the hairy descenders of the original moonshine runners –– we’re talking to you Junior Johnson –– and as much as his sense of self was formed by driving the highway outside of Asheville, N.C., where Robert Mitchum flicked his cigarette into the face of the revenooer in that cinema classic, “Thunder Road,” he would maintain that the federal government has no business sponsoring stock car races if it can’t sponsor young minds.
Take that NASCAR money and invest it in HeadStart. Slap a sticker on those little black kids if you need to, but set ‘em up to win. Give them some factory backing.
That’s the kind of thing Elnuestros can’t help but think when he reads that some tobacco-chewing, snuff-dipping, cousin-porking, inbred, bass-fishing, Vienna-sausage-eating, Winston-smoking Son of the South has faxed a death threat to a member of Congress from Minnesota for having the temerity to suggest that the $7 million a year the Pentagon is spending to sponsor a NASCAR team might be better spent elsewhere.
But as much as he admires the hairy descenders of the original moonshine runners –– we’re talking to you Junior Johnson –– and as much as his sense of self was formed by driving the highway outside of Asheville, N.C., where Robert Mitchum flicked his cigarette into the face of the revenooer in that cinema classic, “Thunder Road,” he would maintain that the federal government has no business sponsoring stock car races if it can’t sponsor young minds.
Take that NASCAR money and invest it in HeadStart. Slap a sticker on those little black kids if you need to, but set ‘em up to win. Give them some factory backing.
That’s the kind of thing Elnuestros can’t help but think when he reads that some tobacco-chewing, snuff-dipping, cousin-porking, inbred, bass-fishing, Vienna-sausage-eating, Winston-smoking Son of the South has faxed a death threat to a member of Congress from Minnesota for having the temerity to suggest that the $7 million a year the Pentagon is spending to sponsor a NASCAR team might be better spent elsewhere.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
I want my Chick-fil-A
Poor Florida Gulf Coast University. Not only does it have one of the world’s truly unfortunate combinations of initials –– FGCU? Were they paying attention –– but it also finds itself constantly embroiled in the kind of petty disruptions that local newspapers love to cover for the color they provide.
The latest example is the tempest in a teaspoon stirred up by one Rashad Davis, who holds the title of director of multicultural relations for the Student Government Association.
Given the Wonder Bread demographics that characterize the college-attending population of Southwest Florida, we’re sure he’s probably hard-pressed to stay busy. But still . . .
Rashad complains that plans to renovate a food court and bring in Chick-fil-A represents a blow to gay people because of what he calls the company’s support of homophobes. Of course, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
In fact, he’s about about as uninformed as they come.
Chick-fil-A doesn’t “associate with homophobic groups.” The corporation, which is family-owned and known for its devout and largely private attitude toward its faith, agreed to a request to furnish food for a gathering attended by some who are intolerant of gay marriage. That fact was incidental to the company’s decision to serve as a vendor for the gathering, but knee-jerk twits have jumped on it as evidence of some nefarious “campaign” to hound gays. That’s malarkey, but understandable in an age in which self-aggrandizing clowns like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have made the demonization of perverts a line item in their annual fund-raising budgets.
The admirable and uncompromisingly tolerant behavior exhibited by the company’s founder, Truett Cathy, and maintained by his sons, has nothing in common with the public posturing of those who have long profited by preaching intolerance for the sake of greed and wrapping themselves in their own, mercenary facsimile of words no real Christian could ever imagine hearing Jesus utter.
Rashad needs to learn about the Google. He could use it to get to the truth about the issue in question. That would be much easier than engaging in the kind of rigorous academic research we taxpayers might have assumed he was prepared to assume as a college sophomore.
Obviously, we overestimated the quality of the education he is receiving at FGCU. He obviously overestimates, too, not only his importance in the battle to protect the rights of gays, but his command of the facts.
As he so blithely charges up the personal San Juan Hill on which he’s chosen to establish his fame and glory, it would behoove him to remember that tolerance is a two-way street, that actions based on assumptions are invariably unfair, and that latching onto an easily discredited cause is unseemly, whether one is doing so to promote bigotry, or to protest it.
The latest example is the tempest in a teaspoon stirred up by one Rashad Davis, who holds the title of director of multicultural relations for the Student Government Association.
Given the Wonder Bread demographics that characterize the college-attending population of Southwest Florida, we’re sure he’s probably hard-pressed to stay busy. But still . . .
Rashad complains that plans to renovate a food court and bring in Chick-fil-A represents a blow to gay people because of what he calls the company’s support of homophobes. Of course, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
In fact, he’s about about as uninformed as they come.
Chick-fil-A doesn’t “associate with homophobic groups.” The corporation, which is family-owned and known for its devout and largely private attitude toward its faith, agreed to a request to furnish food for a gathering attended by some who are intolerant of gay marriage. That fact was incidental to the company’s decision to serve as a vendor for the gathering, but knee-jerk twits have jumped on it as evidence of some nefarious “campaign” to hound gays. That’s malarkey, but understandable in an age in which self-aggrandizing clowns like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have made the demonization of perverts a line item in their annual fund-raising budgets.
The admirable and uncompromisingly tolerant behavior exhibited by the company’s founder, Truett Cathy, and maintained by his sons, has nothing in common with the public posturing of those who have long profited by preaching intolerance for the sake of greed and wrapping themselves in their own, mercenary facsimile of words no real Christian could ever imagine hearing Jesus utter.
Rashad needs to learn about the Google. He could use it to get to the truth about the issue in question. That would be much easier than engaging in the kind of rigorous academic research we taxpayers might have assumed he was prepared to assume as a college sophomore.
Obviously, we overestimated the quality of the education he is receiving at FGCU. He obviously overestimates, too, not only his importance in the battle to protect the rights of gays, but his command of the facts.
As he so blithely charges up the personal San Juan Hill on which he’s chosen to establish his fame and glory, it would behoove him to remember that tolerance is a two-way street, that actions based on assumptions are invariably unfair, and that latching onto an easily discredited cause is unseemly, whether one is doing so to promote bigotry, or to protest it.
I can't drive 55, Version 2.0a
Rick Scott tells President Obama to take his high-speed rail and shove it. Why not? Hey, I’m sure Rick Scott is used to getting around in a private jet. Why should he care that a family in South Florida or Tallahassee has to drive six hours to Disney World? Or that they might not be able to buy the gas and the tickets to the park.
Let’s don’t even begin to talk about the jobs. We all know, or we would if we read the mouth-breathers who commented on this story, that only overpaid, lazy union workers would be hired to build the rail system, and that they would drag their feet and take forever to finish the job because that’s what overpaid, lazy union workers do. And the money they were paid, I mean overpaid, to build the system wouldn’t be spent to improve the American economy or to pay local taxes that support schools and cops and libraries. No, these lazy union workers would probably spend their money at Wal-Mart, so the profit would barely touch the poor non-unionized schmucks stocking the shelves and handing them their shopping carts and go straight overseas to China, which is like Wal-Mart’s Eternal Berry Patch of Happiness or something.
The comments that follow the stories in the Naples Daily News are far more informative than anything its crack team of reporters typically provides. Arguments in support of Scott, who, we are contractually required to mention, took the Fifth Amendment –– the one against incriminating yourself –– 75 times while being questioned about the billions his company ripped off from the taxpayers by overcharging Medicare, take the following approach:
• High-speed rail is a failure in this country. Look at Amtrak.This argument ignores the fact that Amtrak, while subsidized, isn’t nearly as heavily subsidized as highway transportation. Every trucking company, every strip mall developer, every clown with two acres of land withing a miles of an arterial highway, supports the expansion of highways, and therefore the extension of the gridlock that allows so many Americans to get on the phone and do business in their personal automotive cocoon, unlike in Europe where people have to sit next to strangers that include swarthy French women who don’t shave their pits and smell like a stack of stone crab traps in June.
• The people building it will be union workers, and therefore it will cost too much. See above.
• Nobody will ride it. Let me tell you something: A lot of people would be be riding it. Look around, and you’ll see an increasing number of hard-working Americans who no longer have the means to keep reliable, long-range transportation in the driveway. See the USA in your Chevrolet? Yeah, right. With gas headed toward four bucks a gallon and NEVER coming back down, no matter how many rigs we put off the coast, the average American family will be buying fuel-efficient cars that nobody would want to spend six hours in on the interstate, surrounded by crazy long-haul truckers jacked up on who-knows-what, and answering to the dispatcher watching them blip like Pong balls across the screen back at headquarters. They sure won’t be able to afford the gas.
• The rail system is another “government subsidy,” forcing us deeper into the arms of Big Brother and threatening our right to Be Free, as measured by our ability to go where we can no longer afford to go in cars we no longer can afford to buy or gas up. The subsidies that support the highway system, which serves those freight companies more than anyone else, don’t get mentioned.
We kill fifty thousand people a year on the highways, and act like we can’t do a thing about it. If the Muslims or the gay people trying to get married or the teen-aged girls choosing abortions over having a baby alone while in high school were killing that many sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, neighbors and friends, we’d declare war on them in a heartbeat. But we accept death on the highway as our unique American rite of passage, and defy anyone who challenges our right to continue the carnage.
The commenters on the Daily News site are cheerleaders for a status quo that has its fingers on the scales and declares triumphantly that the “numbers don’t lie” in pursuit of their own selfish agenda. They are short-sighted, determined to make the argument a “liberal vs. conservative” thing that they betray their own best interests, especially in the long-term.
But long-term isn’t a view that appeals to them. It’s like the “big picture,” a concept that makes them hunker down and close their minds to anything that isn’t a surefire short-term win.
So they laugh and declare themselves superior to the lemmings as they march blindly toward the cliffs they create with their ignorance and their pride, mocking those who suggest that there’s a better way forward than to “keep on trucking.”
The guy at the head of the pack, the one in the silk tights carrying the flute, is Rick Scott, the Pied Piper of Florida.
Let’s don’t even begin to talk about the jobs. We all know, or we would if we read the mouth-breathers who commented on this story, that only overpaid, lazy union workers would be hired to build the rail system, and that they would drag their feet and take forever to finish the job because that’s what overpaid, lazy union workers do. And the money they were paid, I mean overpaid, to build the system wouldn’t be spent to improve the American economy or to pay local taxes that support schools and cops and libraries. No, these lazy union workers would probably spend their money at Wal-Mart, so the profit would barely touch the poor non-unionized schmucks stocking the shelves and handing them their shopping carts and go straight overseas to China, which is like Wal-Mart’s Eternal Berry Patch of Happiness or something.
The comments that follow the stories in the Naples Daily News are far more informative than anything its crack team of reporters typically provides. Arguments in support of Scott, who, we are contractually required to mention, took the Fifth Amendment –– the one against incriminating yourself –– 75 times while being questioned about the billions his company ripped off from the taxpayers by overcharging Medicare, take the following approach:
• High-speed rail is a failure in this country. Look at Amtrak.This argument ignores the fact that Amtrak, while subsidized, isn’t nearly as heavily subsidized as highway transportation. Every trucking company, every strip mall developer, every clown with two acres of land withing a miles of an arterial highway, supports the expansion of highways, and therefore the extension of the gridlock that allows so many Americans to get on the phone and do business in their personal automotive cocoon, unlike in Europe where people have to sit next to strangers that include swarthy French women who don’t shave their pits and smell like a stack of stone crab traps in June.
• The people building it will be union workers, and therefore it will cost too much. See above.
• Nobody will ride it. Let me tell you something: A lot of people would be be riding it. Look around, and you’ll see an increasing number of hard-working Americans who no longer have the means to keep reliable, long-range transportation in the driveway. See the USA in your Chevrolet? Yeah, right. With gas headed toward four bucks a gallon and NEVER coming back down, no matter how many rigs we put off the coast, the average American family will be buying fuel-efficient cars that nobody would want to spend six hours in on the interstate, surrounded by crazy long-haul truckers jacked up on who-knows-what, and answering to the dispatcher watching them blip like Pong balls across the screen back at headquarters. They sure won’t be able to afford the gas.
• The rail system is another “government subsidy,” forcing us deeper into the arms of Big Brother and threatening our right to Be Free, as measured by our ability to go where we can no longer afford to go in cars we no longer can afford to buy or gas up. The subsidies that support the highway system, which serves those freight companies more than anyone else, don’t get mentioned.
We kill fifty thousand people a year on the highways, and act like we can’t do a thing about it. If the Muslims or the gay people trying to get married or the teen-aged girls choosing abortions over having a baby alone while in high school were killing that many sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, neighbors and friends, we’d declare war on them in a heartbeat. But we accept death on the highway as our unique American rite of passage, and defy anyone who challenges our right to continue the carnage.
The commenters on the Daily News site are cheerleaders for a status quo that has its fingers on the scales and declares triumphantly that the “numbers don’t lie” in pursuit of their own selfish agenda. They are short-sighted, determined to make the argument a “liberal vs. conservative” thing that they betray their own best interests, especially in the long-term.
But long-term isn’t a view that appeals to them. It’s like the “big picture,” a concept that makes them hunker down and close their minds to anything that isn’t a surefire short-term win.
So they laugh and declare themselves superior to the lemmings as they march blindly toward the cliffs they create with their ignorance and their pride, mocking those who suggest that there’s a better way forward than to “keep on trucking.”
The guy at the head of the pack, the one in the silk tights carrying the flute, is Rick Scott, the Pied Piper of Florida.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Five points ahead of an empty hat
CNN is reporting that Florida Sen. Bill Nelson “can’t crack 50 percent against any GOP challenger” in a new survey conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research.
The poll shows Nelson losing to Jeb Bush, who isn’t expected to run, but only five points in front of Connie Mack, who lives in California with the former Mrs. Sonny Bono and who pretends to have a Florida address in order to keep his seat in Congress.
Voters in his Southwest Florida district seem to have no issues with that. They just keep sending him back.
Rick Scott as governor? Mario Rubio and Connie Mack as senators? Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen together couldn’t come up with a scene this absurd.
The poll shows Nelson losing to Jeb Bush, who isn’t expected to run, but only five points in front of Connie Mack, who lives in California with the former Mrs. Sonny Bono and who pretends to have a Florida address in order to keep his seat in Congress.
Voters in his Southwest Florida district seem to have no issues with that. They just keep sending him back.
Rick Scott as governor? Mario Rubio and Connie Mack as senators? Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen together couldn’t come up with a scene this absurd.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Floridians are gloomy, survey shows
The fields have turned brown and more Floridians than ever are ready to pack up the the horse they rode in on and skedaddle.
It’s that darned economy, dontcha know? The elephant in the room, though, is this sobering truth: Florida has been selling off its future to sustain its gold-digging present for a good long while now.
In the early days, the state refused to institute an income tax in an effort to attract wealthy retirees who could move their millions south and help fuel the original land booms. Elnuestros would never argue that sunshine and beaches and golf and fishing and Mickey Mouse don’t contribute to the Florida economy, but he would suggest that all the hospitality and tourism businesses in the whole state won’t keep the new residents the state attracted at the rate of 9,000 or so per day in milk and honey.
Only one industry did that, and its name was development. From highway construction to mining fill to building docks, seawalls and pool enclosures, the state’s economic engine churned and groaned and spit out the bucks. Mortgage brokers, bankers, real estate lawyers, realtors, speculators, developers, strip-mall kings, patio-furniture magnates, septic-tank installers and unemployed carpenters, electricians and plumbers from the dying Midwest glommed onto the easy money like it was going out of style.
And it was. And now it has.
The service industry that grew up to support those new homes is struggling. People can’t write those big checks for pool cleaning and landscaping anymore. Nowhere was that more evident than walking through the Seagate community a while back. Some of those lawns looked like they belonged in Naples Park.
Gone are the days when hotel busboys and valet attendants could flip houses and make thousands “on the side.”
Is there still money in Florida? Oh yeah. But the people living in the giant mansions along Gordon Drive in Naples aren’t digging into their Lily Pulitzer Madras golf shorts to find an extra tax dollar or two. The City of Naples is probably going to stop sponsoring the Swamp Buggy Parade because a town that can block off its main drag to show off its residents’ collection of Ferraris, Maseratis and Lambos can still be too poor to let the natives strut their big-wheeled stuff once a year. City employees are being axed in the town that brags of having more Rolls-Royces and more golf courses per capita than any other city in the nation.
The service industry for that crowd –– dentists who do implants, surgeons who sculpt boobs, boat captains and personal trainers and Gulfstream pilots –– is getting by. But the construction workers who bought homes in Golden Gate Estates and figured there’d always be enough work to pay for the pool and the spa and the flat-panel teevee and the kid’s trip to Europe for her 15th birthday are finding jobs hard to come by. And with gasoline nosing toward $4 a gallon, they’re beginning to rethink the wisdom of buying that big-ass Dodge Ram Hemi given how far east they have to drive to get back to the McMansion at night.
“The public is very wearisome of the slow economic recovery, and the high frustration level of Floridians is impacting their opinion of government at every level,” Dr. Susan A. MacManus, a professor at the University of South Florida, told Leadership Florida’s annual Sunshine State Survey and Elnuestros doesn’t doubt that she’s right.
Like a joyful tourist who’s set his picnic blanket down on a fire ant hill, and is now slapping and moaning and whimpering in reaction to an attack he has no clue how to defend against, the wage-earning Floridian is being battered by a perfect storm of economic factors. But they aren’t necessarily temporary, and there’s nothing to suggest that things will ever “get better” in the sense that building cycles have in the past.
The housing bubble that fueled Florida’s Build at All Costs economy over the past 30 years hasn’t burst. It has exploded, and among the casualties of the blast were millions of dollars in wealth. Vaporized. Gone. Poof. Not coming back.
People who are underwater on their homes aren’t going to be loading the U-Haul for the trip back to Ohio because they can’t get a third of what they paid for their house. Foreclosures in Florida continue to be off the charts, especially in “working class” and “Middle Class Retiree” areas like Golden Gate Estates and Lehigh Acres.
All those hurting people came here knowing about the Sunshine Tax. But nobody told them that sunshine and palm trees and beaches aren’t worth diddly when you’re landlocked in a CBS tomb 30 miles from the Gulf with nothing in the fridge and an empty gas tank and a stack of unpaid bills and your credit cards maxed out.
Pissed about the way things turned out, upset with the “government” they see as the enemy, and flailing at enemies real and imagined, those frustrated Floridians administered their own coup de grace in November by electing as governor a shady health-care executive who pleaded the Fifth Amendment 75 times to avoid being prosecuted for his firm’s theft of millions of taxpayer dollars from Medicare.
The new governor is determined to “fix” the state’s economy by eliminating taxes for corporations, moving utility bills from corporate users onto residents, and gutting the unemployment system. He’s going to privatize prisons and schools, lay off 6,700 state employees and gut the only agency that ever stood in the way of turning the entire state into a strip mall.
Floridians aren’t just pessimistic and frustrated. They’re blind with their rage. They’ve smacked themselves right upside the head and they’re hurting too bad now to even feel it.
Yet.
It’s that darned economy, dontcha know? The elephant in the room, though, is this sobering truth: Florida has been selling off its future to sustain its gold-digging present for a good long while now.
In the early days, the state refused to institute an income tax in an effort to attract wealthy retirees who could move their millions south and help fuel the original land booms. Elnuestros would never argue that sunshine and beaches and golf and fishing and Mickey Mouse don’t contribute to the Florida economy, but he would suggest that all the hospitality and tourism businesses in the whole state won’t keep the new residents the state attracted at the rate of 9,000 or so per day in milk and honey.
Only one industry did that, and its name was development. From highway construction to mining fill to building docks, seawalls and pool enclosures, the state’s economic engine churned and groaned and spit out the bucks. Mortgage brokers, bankers, real estate lawyers, realtors, speculators, developers, strip-mall kings, patio-furniture magnates, septic-tank installers and unemployed carpenters, electricians and plumbers from the dying Midwest glommed onto the easy money like it was going out of style.
And it was. And now it has.
The service industry that grew up to support those new homes is struggling. People can’t write those big checks for pool cleaning and landscaping anymore. Nowhere was that more evident than walking through the Seagate community a while back. Some of those lawns looked like they belonged in Naples Park.
Gone are the days when hotel busboys and valet attendants could flip houses and make thousands “on the side.”
Is there still money in Florida? Oh yeah. But the people living in the giant mansions along Gordon Drive in Naples aren’t digging into their Lily Pulitzer Madras golf shorts to find an extra tax dollar or two. The City of Naples is probably going to stop sponsoring the Swamp Buggy Parade because a town that can block off its main drag to show off its residents’ collection of Ferraris, Maseratis and Lambos can still be too poor to let the natives strut their big-wheeled stuff once a year. City employees are being axed in the town that brags of having more Rolls-Royces and more golf courses per capita than any other city in the nation.
The service industry for that crowd –– dentists who do implants, surgeons who sculpt boobs, boat captains and personal trainers and Gulfstream pilots –– is getting by. But the construction workers who bought homes in Golden Gate Estates and figured there’d always be enough work to pay for the pool and the spa and the flat-panel teevee and the kid’s trip to Europe for her 15th birthday are finding jobs hard to come by. And with gasoline nosing toward $4 a gallon, they’re beginning to rethink the wisdom of buying that big-ass Dodge Ram Hemi given how far east they have to drive to get back to the McMansion at night.
“The public is very wearisome of the slow economic recovery, and the high frustration level of Floridians is impacting their opinion of government at every level,” Dr. Susan A. MacManus, a professor at the University of South Florida, told Leadership Florida’s annual Sunshine State Survey and Elnuestros doesn’t doubt that she’s right.
Like a joyful tourist who’s set his picnic blanket down on a fire ant hill, and is now slapping and moaning and whimpering in reaction to an attack he has no clue how to defend against, the wage-earning Floridian is being battered by a perfect storm of economic factors. But they aren’t necessarily temporary, and there’s nothing to suggest that things will ever “get better” in the sense that building cycles have in the past.
The housing bubble that fueled Florida’s Build at All Costs economy over the past 30 years hasn’t burst. It has exploded, and among the casualties of the blast were millions of dollars in wealth. Vaporized. Gone. Poof. Not coming back.
People who are underwater on their homes aren’t going to be loading the U-Haul for the trip back to Ohio because they can’t get a third of what they paid for their house. Foreclosures in Florida continue to be off the charts, especially in “working class” and “Middle Class Retiree” areas like Golden Gate Estates and Lehigh Acres.
All those hurting people came here knowing about the Sunshine Tax. But nobody told them that sunshine and palm trees and beaches aren’t worth diddly when you’re landlocked in a CBS tomb 30 miles from the Gulf with nothing in the fridge and an empty gas tank and a stack of unpaid bills and your credit cards maxed out.
Pissed about the way things turned out, upset with the “government” they see as the enemy, and flailing at enemies real and imagined, those frustrated Floridians administered their own coup de grace in November by electing as governor a shady health-care executive who pleaded the Fifth Amendment 75 times to avoid being prosecuted for his firm’s theft of millions of taxpayer dollars from Medicare.
The new governor is determined to “fix” the state’s economy by eliminating taxes for corporations, moving utility bills from corporate users onto residents, and gutting the unemployment system. He’s going to privatize prisons and schools, lay off 6,700 state employees and gut the only agency that ever stood in the way of turning the entire state into a strip mall.
Floridians aren’t just pessimistic and frustrated. They’re blind with their rage. They’ve smacked themselves right upside the head and they’re hurting too bad now to even feel it.
Yet.
No entiende 'Elnacho'
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2011/feb/14/immigation-laws-illegal-florida-arizona/?comments_id=953765
Elnuestros weighs in on the latest installment of the Naples Daily News’ immigration series and gets called more names than you can believe, including “anchor baby” and “Elnacho.”
Read the utterances of a high class crowd commenting at the link above, then come back for the background.
Wal-Mart paid giant fines for hiring illegal immigrants to fluff and buff their stores at night. The company hired coyotes, I mean labor contractors, who in turn put the illegals to work with their brooms and mops and nobody was the wiser. Nobody hates Wal-Mart for doing it, or getting caught. It was just a bottom-line business decision, the kind that trumps ideology or principle any day (or night) of the week.
Same thing goes for Florida’s agriculture industry. All those shiny plastic green tomatoes would rot in the fields if it weren’t for an unlimited supply of third-world labor to come and pack them off to the gas chambers for “ripening.” Same with strawberries, citrus, you name it.
The sugar growers around Lake Okeechobee went even further, back before mechanized harvesting was introduced. They got special immigration permission to bring Jamaicans in to cut the cane because not even Mexicans would do THAT work. When the crop was in, the Jamaicans were sent home. Everybody was happy, except the Caribbean cane growers who couldn’t make money because the US government subsidized the price of domestic sugar and imposed tariffs on imports.
Pick another industry. Say hospitality, with its demand for the kind of workers (not American, of course) who are satisfied to live 10 to a room on a busboy’s pay. How about landscaping, or roofing? Don’t you love seeing those good ol’ boys driving around in their humongous Dodge Ram In-Your-Face-Attitude Pickem-up Trucks, making sure their “workers” are doing what they’re being paid, cash under the table, to do?
How about meat-packing. Green Bay used to be a capital for that. Chicago, too. You know the Robert Frost poem, right? Now the packing plants are scattered around the Midwest, manned by immigrants who, once again, can afford to work there because they don’t have those distinctly American Middle Class biases against the living conditions they tolerate in order to afford such jobs. Vicious little circle, right. And the Immigrant Haters accuse them of “stealing” jobs Americans would love to have.
I got news for you, all you chicos and chicas out there. Americans never wanted those jobs for the wages being paid. That’s why the immigrants were trucked in to begin with.
Now, of course, we don’t blame the big industries who need all that wage-busting labor. Now that the Middle Class is on the ropes and job security is as tenuous as the pipe dream of retirement and Mr. and Mrs. Average American are realizing that globalization means importing Third World living conditions to their neighborhood, too, they need someone to blame.
That’s where the immigrant comes in. Just like that rascally black man served to keep Southern crackers distracted from the reality of the lousy pay and conditions those unrepentant Sons of the Confederacy offered in the New South, the Mexican and Guatemalan today give them a scapegoat they can understand without knowing diddly about the impact of NAFTA on Central American agriculture or the role of Congress is making outsourcing the new American Tradition.
Elnuestros weighs in on the latest installment of the Naples Daily News’ immigration series and gets called more names than you can believe, including “anchor baby” and “Elnacho.”
Read the utterances of a high class crowd commenting at the link above, then come back for the background.
Wal-Mart paid giant fines for hiring illegal immigrants to fluff and buff their stores at night. The company hired coyotes, I mean labor contractors, who in turn put the illegals to work with their brooms and mops and nobody was the wiser. Nobody hates Wal-Mart for doing it, or getting caught. It was just a bottom-line business decision, the kind that trumps ideology or principle any day (or night) of the week.
Same thing goes for Florida’s agriculture industry. All those shiny plastic green tomatoes would rot in the fields if it weren’t for an unlimited supply of third-world labor to come and pack them off to the gas chambers for “ripening.” Same with strawberries, citrus, you name it.
The sugar growers around Lake Okeechobee went even further, back before mechanized harvesting was introduced. They got special immigration permission to bring Jamaicans in to cut the cane because not even Mexicans would do THAT work. When the crop was in, the Jamaicans were sent home. Everybody was happy, except the Caribbean cane growers who couldn’t make money because the US government subsidized the price of domestic sugar and imposed tariffs on imports.
Pick another industry. Say hospitality, with its demand for the kind of workers (not American, of course) who are satisfied to live 10 to a room on a busboy’s pay. How about landscaping, or roofing? Don’t you love seeing those good ol’ boys driving around in their humongous Dodge Ram In-Your-Face-Attitude Pickem-up Trucks, making sure their “workers” are doing what they’re being paid, cash under the table, to do?
How about meat-packing. Green Bay used to be a capital for that. Chicago, too. You know the Robert Frost poem, right? Now the packing plants are scattered around the Midwest, manned by immigrants who, once again, can afford to work there because they don’t have those distinctly American Middle Class biases against the living conditions they tolerate in order to afford such jobs. Vicious little circle, right. And the Immigrant Haters accuse them of “stealing” jobs Americans would love to have.
I got news for you, all you chicos and chicas out there. Americans never wanted those jobs for the wages being paid. That’s why the immigrants were trucked in to begin with.
Now, of course, we don’t blame the big industries who need all that wage-busting labor. Now that the Middle Class is on the ropes and job security is as tenuous as the pipe dream of retirement and Mr. and Mrs. Average American are realizing that globalization means importing Third World living conditions to their neighborhood, too, they need someone to blame.
That’s where the immigrant comes in. Just like that rascally black man served to keep Southern crackers distracted from the reality of the lousy pay and conditions those unrepentant Sons of the Confederacy offered in the New South, the Mexican and Guatemalan today give them a scapegoat they can understand without knowing diddly about the impact of NAFTA on Central American agriculture or the role of Congress is making outsourcing the new American Tradition.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)