@Balrog99 " It's also not white Canadians or Europeans trying to illegally enter the US."
Nitpick here. Canadians are actually one of the demographics that stay past the duration of travel visas. At any given time, there are a couple thousand Canadian visitors who are illegally staying in the country due to expired Visa. Which is also the BIGGEST source of illegal immigration. But no, gotta blame the brown people.
For all the conservative cries of people entering the country illegally. Its just not happening.
A 'couple thousand' Canadian visitors? Really? When it gets to a couple million let me know and I'll be just as concerned about illegal Canadian immigrants...
@Balrog99 " It's also not white Canadians or Europeans trying to illegally enter the US."
Nitpick here. Canadians are actually one of the demographics that stay past the duration of travel visas. At any given time, there are a couple thousand Canadian visitors who are illegally staying in the country due to expired Visa. Which is also the BIGGEST source of illegal immigration. But no, gotta blame the brown people.
For all the conservative cries of people entering the country illegally. Its just not happening.
A 'couple thousand' Canadian visitors? Really? When it gets to a couple million let me know and I'll be just as concerned about illegal Canadian immigrants...
Okay, but we aren't even at a couple million South American's illegally entering either. So by your own logic, you shouldn't be worrying about the otehr border either.
@Balrog99 " It's also not white Canadians or Europeans trying to illegally enter the US."
Nitpick here. Canadians are actually one of the demographics that stay past the duration of travel visas. At any given time, there are a couple thousand Canadian visitors who are illegally staying in the country due to expired Visa. Which is also the BIGGEST source of illegal immigration. But no, gotta blame the brown people.
For all the conservative cries of people entering the country illegally. Its just not happening.
A 'couple thousand' Canadian visitors? Really? When it gets to a couple million let me know and I'll be just as concerned about illegal Canadian immigrants...
Okay, but we aren't even at a couple million South American's illegally entering either. So by your own logic, you shouldn't be worrying about the otehr border either.
If you count the illegals already here we're way up into the millions though. Your quote was that 'at any given time' there are a couple thousand Canadian visitors staying illegally. Well, 'at any given time' there are over 20 MILLION illegals here from Latin America. That they have brown skin is irrelevant in my opinion. I personally consider Latinos, and Arabics basically white people. Hell, most white folks would kill to have a tan like that!
Crossing a border illegally and then asking for asylum IS illegal.
Legally requesting asylum usually means there will be a waiting period. Therein lies the rub. What do you do with them during the wait? The other thing is, being granted asylum should mean going back to your home country once the reason for the granted asylum has been addressed. How many people granted asylum ever go back?
@Balrog99 So, are you concerned with people entering the country illegally? Or on people already here? They aren't the same thing. One isn't even happening, and Trump has done NOTHING to fix the other.
@Balrog99 " It's also not white Canadians or Europeans trying to illegally enter the US."
Nitpick here. Canadians are actually one of the demographics that stay past the duration of travel visas. At any given time, there are a couple thousand Canadian visitors who are illegally staying in the country due to expired Visa. Which is also the BIGGEST source of illegal immigration. But no, gotta blame the brown people.
For all the conservative cries of people entering the country illegally. Its just not happening.
A 'couple thousand' Canadian visitors? Really? When it gets to a couple million let me know and I'll be just as concerned about illegal Canadian immigrants...
Okay, but we aren't even at a couple million South American's illegally entering either. So by your own logic, you shouldn't be worrying about the otehr border either.
If you count the illegals already here we're way up into the millions though. Your quote was that 'at any given time' there are a couple thousand Canadian visitors staying illegally. Well, 'at any given time' there are over 20 MILLION illegals here from Latin America. That they have brown skin is irrelevant in my opinion. I personally consider Latinos, and Arabics basically white people. Hell, most white folks would kill to have a tan like that!
Do you have a source for that figure @Balrog99? My understanding was that the total number of illegals was in the region of 10-12m - see this article for instance. Something like 75% of that total come from Latin America, with about 70,000 from Canada. As I referred to before, the total has also been falling over the last decade.
In relation to the wider issue of immigration I accept that there is a real policy issue with the number of people that want to come to the US. While I'm not a particular fan of the agreement just reached with Mexico, I can understand the desire to take action of some sort. It's the way that action is being taken that I find more worrying. The attempt to dictate to Mexico what they should do seems unwise to me, given the benefits of having good relationships with your neighbors. Then of course there's the ongoing use of emergency powers over an issue that has none of the hallmarks of an emergency. Even where strains on the system are showing up, those are essentially the result of deliberate policy choices (such as criminalizing immigrants and partial closures of borders), rather than an inevitable result of the issue itself.
There are two issues we aren't even remotely addressing in regards to this topic. The first being that American business owners (including Trump himself) are MORE than willing to hire illegal immigrants and get nothing more than a monetary slap on the wrist for doing so. The other being the issue of asylum seekers, which is caused in no small part by our own failed Drug War creating such a bottomless market for illegal drugs that it has turned many of these Central American countries into narco states. We lead the world in demand for illegal drugs. The problems in these countries and the wealth of those responsible for them would not be possible if not for our own draconian policies on drugs. What do you imagine would happen to the South American cocaine trade if the United States decriminalized it??
Prohibition showed us exactly what happens when you make mind-altering substances illegal. The moment it happened, organized crime was engaging in violent turf wars to sell alcohol. It's why anyone even knows who Al Capone is. When is the last time you saw a bunch of bootleggers get in a shootout?? The only thing prohibition resulted in was alot of dead bodies and rich criminals.
@Balrog99 " It's also not white Canadians or Europeans trying to illegally enter the US."
Nitpick here. Canadians are actually one of the demographics that stay past the duration of travel visas. At any given time, there are a couple thousand Canadian visitors who are illegally staying in the country due to expired Visa. Which is also the BIGGEST source of illegal immigration. But no, gotta blame the brown people.
For all the conservative cries of people entering the country illegally. Its just not happening.
A 'couple thousand' Canadian visitors? Really? When it gets to a couple million let me know and I'll be just as concerned about illegal Canadian immigrants...
Okay, but we aren't even at a couple million South American's illegally entering either. So by your own logic, you shouldn't be worrying about the otehr border either.
If you count the illegals already here we're way up into the millions though. Your quote was that 'at any given time' there are a couple thousand Canadian visitors staying illegally. Well, 'at any given time' there are over 20 MILLION illegals here from Latin America. That they have brown skin is irrelevant in my opinion. I personally consider Latinos, and Arabics basically white people. Hell, most white folks would kill to have a tan like that!
Do you have a source for that figure @Balrog99? My understanding was that the total number of illegals was in the region of 10-12m - see this article for instance. Something like 75% of that total come from Latin America, with about 70,000 from Canada. As I referred to before, the total has also been falling over the last decade.
In relation to the wider issue of immigration I accept that there is a real policy issue with the number of people that want to come to the US. While I'm not a particular fan of the agreement just reached with Mexico, I can understand the desire to take action of some sort. It's the way that action is being taken that I find more worrying. The attempt to dictate to Mexico what they should do seems unwise to me, given the benefits of having good relationships with your neighbors. Then of course there's the ongoing use of emergency powers over an issue that has none of the hallmarks of an emergency. Even where strains on the system are showing up, those are essentially the result of deliberate policy choices (such as criminalizing immigrants and partial closures of borders), rather than an inevitable result of the issue itself.
Too lazy to search for long so just looked it up in Wikipedia. I was going to say 10 million but I've been hearing 16-20 million a lot the past few years so thought I'd stretch it a bit for drama. Wiki says about 10 million with some estimates (disputed) as high as 22 million...
There are two issues we aren't even remotely addressing in regards to this topic. The first being that American business owners (including Trump himself) are MORE than willing to hire illegal immigrants and get nothing more than a monetary slap on the wrist for doing so. The other being the issue of asylum seekers, which is caused in no small part by our own failed Drug War creating such a bottomless market for illegal drugs that it has turned many of these Central American countries into narco states. We lead the world in demand for illegal drugs. The problems in these countries and the wealth of those responsible for them would not be possible if not for our own draconian policies on drugs. What do you imagine would happen to the South American cocaine trade if the United States decriminalized it??
Prohibition showed us exactly what happens when you make mind-altering substances illegal. The moment it happened, organized crime was engaging in violent turf wars to sell alcohol. It's why anyone even knows who Al Capone is. When is the last time you saw a bunch of bootleggers get in a shootout?? The only thing prohibition resulted in was alot of dead bodies and rich criminals.
I actually agree with you about drug legalization believe it or not. What we've been doing for the last 3 or 4 decades clearly isn't working...
Dunno if he's joking or not but supposedly that was basically happened in America in the early days the Irish, Italians, and Jewish people were not considered white ("an accepted part of the dominant ruling class in the United States") and the conservatives and racists at the time complained they were invading.
Latino/Hispanic folks are part-white, and in some cases are actually majority-white by ancestry. The ethnicity is a generic term for multi-racial people with European, African, and/or Native American ancestry, and there's no specific ratio or rule about what qualifies as Latino or Hispanic. A 60% white person is still called Hispanic because, at least in the U.S., we define white as the absence of non-white ancestry, rather than the presence of 51% or more European ancestry. My high school was 70% Hispanic (though we used the term "Mexican" exclusively) and a lot of the Hispanic folks were snow white. I had a professor who was Hispanic and had red hair.
As for Arabs... well, yeah, they kind of are white people. There's not even really a caveat to that, honestly.
There has always been lots of interbreeding between "Europe" and the "Middle East," which have neither a natural nor a political barrier. Hell, Turkey is a majority-Muslim member of the European Union. There's a reason anthropologists and scholars of ancient human migration patterns tend to refer to "Indo-European" peoples rather than making some arbitrary distinction between the French and the Italians, the Italians and the Greeks, the Greeks and the Turks, the Turks and the Arabs, or the Arabs and the Indians.
Even facial features are pretty consistent across that section of Eurasia. If I got a tan and darkened my beard, I could easily pass for Saudi Arabian, and I'm pure white as far as my parents' DNA results found. My Nepalese friend in college was basically a chocolate-colored white dude. I mean, a sub-Saharan African would definitely be hard-pressed to pass as Japanese, but the same doesn't apply to the Indo-European folks stretching pretty much all the way from Ireland to Bangladesh.
A Frenchman is just an Iranian who doesn't get enough sun.
Wow. I mean, just wow. What do we keep telling people EVERY time?? This is solid reporting that the terms Trump announced with Mexico took place MONTHS ago. Months. Ago. Which means the ENTIRE tariff fiasco, which caused real-life stock market consequences and other effects, was COMPLETELY fabricated. The outcome was already determined and he was just putting on a kabuki theater that just happened to involve the fate of billions of dollars and countless industries, businesses, and jobs. Get this man out of office:
We're all adults who understand any politician will lie occasionally, either our of necessity of convenience. No one is naive enough to think otherwise. But how long can we continue to hold together a democracy when literally every single thing, day after day, month after month is not only a deceit, but deliberate deceits of the most obvious and purposeful kind. If Trump or the White House says something, there is at least (and this is not hyperbole) a 90% chance it is not only untrue, but likely the complete opposite of what they are saying. Manufactured trade disputes that have already been negotiated being used as political theater affect the real-life economy. Helping spread doctored videos. An Attorney General who willfully misrepresented the findings of one of the most important investigations in recent memory, and who is not the AG of the United States, but the President's personal fixer leading the Justice Department. A country of 300+ million people cannot continue on a stable course being fed this kind of disinformation on a daily basis. Everything will eventually crack underneath us. He is obliterating the very concept of objective truth.
He could have EASILY just come out and said that a deal had been reached with Mexico recently to increase their military presence in regards to Central American refugees. But it wouldn't have satisfied his need for drama and domination. So instead we got the last week, which was all a complete sham. And of course, what are you supposed to do, ignore it?? Even if it IS Lucy and the football every time, you can't (especially from a media perspective) just IGNORE it when the President proposes what amounts to a 5% tax for all American consumers on Mexican goods. You can't ignore it when it causes the stock market to plunge the next day. And we'll just rinse and repeat, manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis, until the thing just crumbles under the weight of this absurdity.
Dunno if he's joking or not but supposedly that was basically happened in America in the early days the Irish, Italians, and Jewish people were not considered white ("an accepted part of the dominant ruling class in the United States") and the conservatives and racists at the time complained they were invading.
Don't forget the Greeks and Slavs who also used to be considered non-white for some reason...
Dunno if he's joking or not but supposedly that was basically happened in America in the early days the Irish, Italians, and Jewish people were not considered white ("an accepted part of the dominant ruling class in the United States") and the conservatives and racists at the time complained they were invading.
Don't forget the Greeks and Slavs who also used to be considered non-white for some reason...
So can't we all just get along then. I think so and that's why I find Trump repulsive because he pushes that we can't
Latino/Hispanic folks are part-white, and in some cases are actually majority-white by ancestry. The ethnicity is a generic term for multi-racial people with European, African, and/or Native American ancestry, and there's no specific ratio or rule about what qualifies as Latino or Hispanic. A 60% white person is still called Hispanic because, at least in the U.S., we define white as the absence of non-white ancestry, rather than the presence of 51% or more European ancestry. My high school was 70% Hispanic (though we used the term "Mexican" exclusively) and a lot of the Hispanic folks were snow white. I had a professor who was Hispanic and had red hair.
As for Arabs... well, yeah, they kind of are white people. There's not even really a caveat to that, honestly.
There has always been lots of interbreeding between "Europe" and the "Middle East," which have neither a natural nor a political barrier. Hell, Turkey is a majority-Muslim member of the European Union. There's a reason anthropologists and scholars of ancient human migration patterns tend to refer to "Indo-European" peoples rather than making some arbitrary distinction between the French and the Italians, the Italians and the Greeks, the Greeks and the Turks, the Turks and the Arabs, or the Arabs and the Indians.
Even facial features are pretty consistent across that section of Eurasia. If I got a tan and darkened my beard, I could easily pass for Saudi Arabian, and I'm pure white as far as my parents' DNA results found. My Nepalese friend in college was basically a chocolate-colored white dude. I mean, a sub-Saharan African would definitely be hard-pressed to pass as Japanese, but the same doesn't apply to the Indo-European folks stretching pretty much all the way from Ireland to Bangladesh.
A Frenchman is just an Iranian who doesn't get enough sun.
It's a bit nit-picky, but Turkey is not a member of the EU. A small part of the country (west of the Bosphorus) is generally classed as being within Europe and, based on that, Turkey was classed as an eligible candidate for the EU in 1999. Despite deliberate scare stories (notably during the Brexit referendum), they have never been close to actually being allowed to apply and currently there is absolutely no prospect at all of them joining (to have any such prospect would require a new government, constitution & legal system as well as meeting financial criteria).
I agree with your main point that there's no clear ethnic distinction between people in Europe and outside. Referring to previous discussions in the thread though I would prefer it if we got rid of the concept of ethnicity entirely. There's no scientific basis for that and, while it can be potentially helpful in targeting political priorities, I think other demographic classifications do a better job. In practice I think ethnicity is more used as a means to justify and reinforce discrimination than to target support aimed at eliminating discrimination.
Irish, Italians, and Jewish people were not considered white ("an accepted part of the dominant ruling class in the United States") and the conservatives and racists at the time complained they were invading.
Yes - I am intimately familiar with the trend of different ethnic groups getting folded into the mainstream, thereafter being considered "white."
Thing is, it is a trend. And all it takes is a tiny bit of extrapolation before you get smacked in the forehead with the question of "why are we bothering to maintain the separate category of 'non-white?'" What's the point of the distinction, if we know the distinction is going to be constantly eroded, and we're okay with that?
The point is "the other" is scary. Conservative minds are fearful. It's been studied scientifically:
It's like they need to latch on to a father figure to protect them because they feel inadequate or weak or something.
Also, and I've quoted this before here because it's the heart of the political strategy employed by Trump and Conservatives:
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." - Hermann Goering
"Being attacked" does that sound familiar? "invasion" of "illegal aliens" scary "caravans" supposedly full of ms13 and Arab terrorists right?
Conservative politics 101 - sell people a threat that you alone can save them from. Bonus points if it's something exotic or different because different is scary. Then you run off with all the money.
After the New York Times story hit last night, Trump has now blasted out a 4-part tweet that claims (essentially) that there is a "secret" part of the deal that hasn't been announced yet, but will be at the appropriate time.
Latino/Hispanic folks are part-white, and in some cases are actually majority-white by ancestry. The ethnicity is a generic term for multi-racial people with European, African, and/or Native American ancestry, and there's no specific ratio or rule about what qualifies as Latino or Hispanic. A 60% white person is still called Hispanic because, at least in the U.S., we define white as the absence of non-white ancestry, rather than the presence of 51% or more European ancestry. My high school was 70% Hispanic (though we used the term "Mexican" exclusively) and a lot of the Hispanic folks were snow white. I had a professor who was Hispanic and had red hair.
As for Arabs... well, yeah, they kind of are white people. There's not even really a caveat to that, honestly.
There has always been lots of interbreeding between "Europe" and the "Middle East," which have neither a natural nor a political barrier. Hell, Turkey is a majority-Muslim member of the European Union. There's a reason anthropologists and scholars of ancient human migration patterns tend to refer to "Indo-European" peoples rather than making some arbitrary distinction between the French and the Italians, the Italians and the Greeks, the Greeks and the Turks, the Turks and the Arabs, or the Arabs and the Indians.
Even facial features are pretty consistent across that section of Eurasia. If I got a tan and darkened my beard, I could easily pass for Saudi Arabian, and I'm pure white as far as my parents' DNA results found. My Nepalese friend in college was basically a chocolate-colored white dude. I mean, a sub-Saharan African would definitely be hard-pressed to pass as Japanese, but the same doesn't apply to the Indo-European folks stretching pretty much all the way from Ireland to Bangladesh.
A Frenchman is just an Iranian who doesn't get enough sun.
It's a bit nit-picky, but Turkey is not a member of the EU. A small part of the country (west of the Bosphorus) is generally classed as being within Europe and, based on that, Turkey was classed as an eligible candidate for the EU in 1999. Despite deliberate scare stories (notably during the Brexit referendum), they have never been close to actually being allowed to apply and currently there is absolutely no prospect at all of them joining (to have any such prospect would require a new government, constitution & legal system as well as meeting financial criteria).
I agree with your main point that there's no clear ethnic distinction between people in Europe and outside. Referring to previous discussions in the thread though I would prefer it if we got rid of the concept of ethnicity entirely. There's no scientific basis for that and, while it can be potentially helpful in targeting political priorities, I think other demographic classifications do a better job. In practice I think ethnicity is more used as a means to justify and reinforce discrimination than to target support aimed at eliminating discrimination.
I would add that Turkey IS part of NATO, however, and has some privileged trade agreements with the EU.
And as an aside, even though it's far from the most egregious issue here, it seems clear to me they are counting the weight of the chocolate here as well, which is just insanity.
The date of the actual crime is also of importance May 2014. If the legislation was actually going to make a difference, I think the defence would have asked for a tiny bit more time on the case as they’ve already waited 5 years for this to go to trial.
It’s not like he ordered the chocolate a week before the legislation was going to be passed. If they were actually counting the weight (which is individually wrapped bars that are easy to sell) he’d be going away for a much longer time.
Now is 4 years still excessive? IMO yes. Is the judge doing everything he can to delay this person going to prison? It does seem that way.
After the New York Times story hit last night, Trump has now blasted out a 4-part tweet that claims (essentially) that there is a "secret" part of the deal that hasn't been announced yet, but will be at the appropriate time.
A conspiracy that there's more than what we see on the surface and in the contracts. Very Trumpy.
I wonder if the conspiracy crowd that follows him will believe this one. Oh wait of course they will, they've bought everything so far, why stop now?
It's the same for the wall. Conspiratorial thinking.
The Trumpists don't have the wall that has been promised will solve all their problems. They really want it because they don't have it. Donnie tells them we need the wall and everything will be better. Guess what, if you get the wall then it won't solve all your problems and make you happy.
So Donnie will have to sell you another story. There's always another sack of magic beans for sale. After every failure there's always some 'thing' more, some other distraction, some other goal. There is no end but things can get really bad as you keep going. Death cults of personality can end up like Jonestown, branch davidians, Heaven’s Gate, Manson family, or Nazi Germany. The next 'thing' and the truth are an ever moving target to con-men. Will these true believers figure out they are being conned before it's too late?
This is absolute absurdity. The President's son-in-law (who is a West Wing employee) is getting $90 million dollars from shadowy foreign investors, and the Senate Majority Leader is having his cabinet official wife steer nearly $80 million dollars to his pet projects:
Anyone who at this late date is still spouting this "drain the swamp" line have to among least informed people on planet earth. This is a all-you-can-eat buffet of massive, unprecedented corruption 24/7/365. The reason they continue to get away with it is because the scale of it is so unimaginable.
This is absolute absurdity. The President's son-in-law (who is a West Wing employee) is getting $90 million dollars from shadowy foreign investors, and the Senate Majority Leader is having his cabinet official wife steer nearly $80 million dollars to his pet projects:
Anyone who at this late date is still spouting this "drain the swamp" line have to among least informed people on planet earth. This is a all-you-can-eat buffet of massive, unprecedented corruption 24/7/365. The reason they continue to get away with it is because the scale of it is so unimaginable.
You know what? You'd have a lot more credibility if you didn't say things like 'Jared Kushner is getting $90M' when that clearly is not stated in the referenced article. Neither did McConnell personally get $80M.
People with lots of money do things that involve lots of money. If I were a billionaire I'd probably be dealing with things that apparently you consider 'obscene' amounts of money.
This is absolute absurdity. The President's son-in-law (who is a West Wing employee) is getting $90 million dollars from shadowy foreign investors, and the Senate Majority Leader is having his cabinet official wife steer nearly $80 million dollars to his pet projects:
Anyone who at this late date is still spouting this "drain the swamp" line have to among least informed people on planet earth. This is a all-you-can-eat buffet of massive, unprecedented corruption 24/7/365. The reason they continue to get away with it is because the scale of it is so unimaginable.
You know what? You'd have a lot more credibility if you didn't say things like 'Jared Kushner is getting $90M' when that clearly is not stated in the referenced article. Neither did McConnell personally get $80M.
People with lots of money do things that involve lots of money. If I were a billionaire I'd probably be dealing with things that apparently you consider 'obscene' amounts of money.
Kushner owns a significant portion of the company. He works in the White House. Chao is the Secretary of Transportation, and she was steering massive projects to Kentucky to bolster her husbands election prospects. But hey, why don't we let everyone who runs every agency and holds every government position use it SPECIFICALLY for personal enrichment and everyone will just shrug their shoulders and move on. Does anyone on the right care AT ALL about these kind of conflicts of interest?? Or are you totally fine with governmental policy benefiting the familes of those in power above all other concerns??
Do you think you can manage your capital-intensive business better than a blind trust can? Is managing it important to you? Is the prospect of increasing your wealth by personally managing your business important to you?
If so... why are you going into government service??
It's fairly easy to avoid conflicts of interest when in government service. It involves taking really basic steps. For instance: either 1) don't go into a position that is sensitive foreign influence; or 2) don't allow anything resembling foreign influence near your business.
Kushner has decided "nope, I'm going to do both of those things." I mean, you could miss out on potentially profitable deals if you pass on foreign money. A $90M capital infusion into your ~$250M business is a BIG deal.
The question again is, why? Why run headlong into a conflict of interest? Why put Jared into a position for which he is manifestly unqualified, and which is specifically vulnerable to this specific kind of conflict of interest?
The obvious answer is, "because that is profitable too." And that could only be profitable if he is abusing the position to some degree or other. There could be other explanations... but I have not seen any put forward. So I have to think it's simple corruption, through and through. The amount of money doesn't matter (and I didn't see anyone call 8 figure sums "obscene"). It's that they are joyously embracing financial conflicts of interest for no apparent reason other than the corrupt profit motive.
That's, like, a really fundamental problem to have with people in government. The law of conflicts of interest is really well-developed and pretty simple. The idea that members of the administration can just opt-out is outrageous; the idea that the typical check on such behavior - elections - no longer works because one party has decided to let it go unchecked, is sad. The idea that rich people should be immune just ecause the numbers are big, is horrifying. This is the kind of thing that we should all be able to agree on, and write some rules directly into the Constitution. It's kind of shocking to me to see Republicans so quickly walk away from what should be an area of universal agreement.
You seem to think that governments haven't been this way since the beginning of civilization. Maybe one of the benefits of having Trump and his cronies in office for a while will be better scrutiny of our politicians in general and maybe some concrete laws that can actually be used to put abusers in prison. We don't have that now because they didn't want that until now, not because it wasn't needed before!
Do you think you can manage your capital-intensive business better than a blind trust can? Is managing it important to you? Is the prospect of increasing your wealth by personally managing your business important to you?
If so... why are you going into government service??
It's fairly easy to avoid conflicts of interest when in government service. It involves taking really basic steps. For instance: either 1) don't go into a position that is sensitive foreign influence; or 2) don't allow anything resembling foreign influence near your business.
Kushner has decided "nope, I'm going to do both of those things." I mean, you could miss out on potentially profitable deals if you pass on foreign money. A $90M capital infusion into your ~$250M business is a BIG deal.
The question again is, why? Why run headlong into a conflict of interest? Why put Jared into a position for which he is manifestly unqualified, and which is specifically vulnerable to this specific kind of conflict of interest?
The obvious answer is, "because that is profitable too." And that could only be profitable if he is abusing the position to some degree or other. There could be other explanations... but I have not seen any put forward. So I have to think it's simple corruption, through and through. The amount of money doesn't matter (and I didn't see anyone call 8 figure sums "obscene"). It's that they are joyously embracing financial conflicts of interest for no apparent reason other than the corrupt profit motive.
That's, like, a really fundamental problem to have with people in government. The law of conflicts of interest is really well-developed and pretty simple. The idea that members of the administration can just opt-out is outrageous; the idea that the typical check on such behavior - elections - no longer works because one party has decided to let it go unchecked, is sad. The idea that rich people should be immune just ecause the numbers are big, is horrifying. This is the kind of thing that we should all be able to agree on, and write some rules directly into the Constitution. It's kind of shocking to me to see Republicans so quickly walk away from what should be an area of universal agreement.
You seem to think that governments haven't been this way since the beginning of civilization. Maybe one of the benefits of having Trump and his cronies in office for a while will be better scrutiny of our politicians in general and maybe some concrete laws that can actually be used to put abusers in prison. We don't have that now because they didn't want that until now, not because it wasn't needed before!
Comments
A 'couple thousand' Canadian visitors? Really? When it gets to a couple million let me know and I'll be just as concerned about illegal Canadian immigrants...
Okay, but we aren't even at a couple million South American's illegally entering either. So by your own logic, you shouldn't be worrying about the otehr border either.
If you count the illegals already here we're way up into the millions though. Your quote was that 'at any given time' there are a couple thousand Canadian visitors staying illegally. Well, 'at any given time' there are over 20 MILLION illegals here from Latin America. That they have brown skin is irrelevant in my opinion. I personally consider Latinos, and Arabics basically white people. Hell, most white folks would kill to have a tan like that!
Crossing a border illegally and then asking for asylum IS illegal.
Legally requesting asylum usually means there will be a waiting period. Therein lies the rub. What do you do with them during the wait? The other thing is, being granted asylum should mean going back to your home country once the reason for the granted asylum has been addressed. How many people granted asylum ever go back?
Do you have a source for that figure @Balrog99? My understanding was that the total number of illegals was in the region of 10-12m - see this article for instance. Something like 75% of that total come from Latin America, with about 70,000 from Canada. As I referred to before, the total has also been falling over the last decade.
In relation to the wider issue of immigration I accept that there is a real policy issue with the number of people that want to come to the US. While I'm not a particular fan of the agreement just reached with Mexico, I can understand the desire to take action of some sort. It's the way that action is being taken that I find more worrying. The attempt to dictate to Mexico what they should do seems unwise to me, given the benefits of having good relationships with your neighbors. Then of course there's the ongoing use of emergency powers over an issue that has none of the hallmarks of an emergency. Even where strains on the system are showing up, those are essentially the result of deliberate policy choices (such as criminalizing immigrants and partial closures of borders), rather than an inevitable result of the issue itself.
Prohibition showed us exactly what happens when you make mind-altering substances illegal. The moment it happened, organized crime was engaging in violent turf wars to sell alcohol. It's why anyone even knows who Al Capone is. When is the last time you saw a bunch of bootleggers get in a shootout?? The only thing prohibition resulted in was alot of dead bodies and rich criminals.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigrant_population_of_the_United_States
Too lazy to search for long so just looked it up in Wikipedia. I was going to say 10 million but I've been hearing 16-20 million a lot the past few years so thought I'd stretch it a bit for drama. Wiki says about 10 million with some estimates (disputed) as high as 22 million...
I actually agree with you about drug legalization believe it or not. What we've been doing for the last 3 or 4 decades clearly isn't working...
Dunno if he's joking or not but supposedly that was basically happened in America in the early days the Irish, Italians, and Jewish people were not considered white ("an accepted part of the dominant ruling class in the United States") and the conservatives and racists at the time complained they were invading.
As for Arabs... well, yeah, they kind of are white people. There's not even really a caveat to that, honestly.
There has always been lots of interbreeding between "Europe" and the "Middle East," which have neither a natural nor a political barrier. Hell, Turkey is a majority-Muslim member of the European Union. There's a reason anthropologists and scholars of ancient human migration patterns tend to refer to "Indo-European" peoples rather than making some arbitrary distinction between the French and the Italians, the Italians and the Greeks, the Greeks and the Turks, the Turks and the Arabs, or the Arabs and the Indians.
Even facial features are pretty consistent across that section of Eurasia. If I got a tan and darkened my beard, I could easily pass for Saudi Arabian, and I'm pure white as far as my parents' DNA results found. My Nepalese friend in college was basically a chocolate-colored white dude. I mean, a sub-Saharan African would definitely be hard-pressed to pass as Japanese, but the same doesn't apply to the Indo-European folks stretching pretty much all the way from Ireland to Bangladesh.
A Frenchman is just an Iranian who doesn't get enough sun.
We're all adults who understand any politician will lie occasionally, either our of necessity of convenience. No one is naive enough to think otherwise. But how long can we continue to hold together a democracy when literally every single thing, day after day, month after month is not only a deceit, but deliberate deceits of the most obvious and purposeful kind. If Trump or the White House says something, there is at least (and this is not hyperbole) a 90% chance it is not only untrue, but likely the complete opposite of what they are saying. Manufactured trade disputes that have already been negotiated being used as political theater affect the real-life economy. Helping spread doctored videos. An Attorney General who willfully misrepresented the findings of one of the most important investigations in recent memory, and who is not the AG of the United States, but the President's personal fixer leading the Justice Department. A country of 300+ million people cannot continue on a stable course being fed this kind of disinformation on a daily basis. Everything will eventually crack underneath us. He is obliterating the very concept of objective truth.
He could have EASILY just come out and said that a deal had been reached with Mexico recently to increase their military presence in regards to Central American refugees. But it wouldn't have satisfied his need for drama and domination. So instead we got the last week, which was all a complete sham. And of course, what are you supposed to do, ignore it?? Even if it IS Lucy and the football every time, you can't (especially from a media perspective) just IGNORE it when the President proposes what amounts to a 5% tax for all American consumers on Mexican goods. You can't ignore it when it causes the stock market to plunge the next day. And we'll just rinse and repeat, manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis, until the thing just crumbles under the weight of this absurdity.
Don't forget the Greeks and Slavs who also used to be considered non-white for some reason...
So can't we all just get along then. I think so and that's why I find Trump repulsive because he pushes that we can't
It's a bit nit-picky, but Turkey is not a member of the EU. A small part of the country (west of the Bosphorus) is generally classed as being within Europe and, based on that, Turkey was classed as an eligible candidate for the EU in 1999. Despite deliberate scare stories (notably during the Brexit referendum), they have never been close to actually being allowed to apply and currently there is absolutely no prospect at all of them joining (to have any such prospect would require a new government, constitution & legal system as well as meeting financial criteria).
I agree with your main point that there's no clear ethnic distinction between people in Europe and outside. Referring to previous discussions in the thread though I would prefer it if we got rid of the concept of ethnicity entirely. There's no scientific basis for that and, while it can be potentially helpful in targeting political priorities, I think other demographic classifications do a better job. In practice I think ethnicity is more used as a means to justify and reinforce discrimination than to target support aimed at eliminating discrimination.
The point is "the other" is scary. Conservative minds are fearful. It's been studied scientifically:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201612/fear-and-anxiety-drive-conservatives-political-attitudes
It's like they need to latch on to a father figure to protect them because they feel inadequate or weak or something.
Also, and I've quoted this before here because it's the heart of the political strategy employed by Trump and Conservatives:
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." - Hermann Goering
"Being attacked" does that sound familiar? "invasion" of "illegal aliens" scary "caravans" supposedly full of ms13 and Arab terrorists right?
Conservative politics 101 - sell people a threat that you alone can save them from. Bonus points if it's something exotic or different because different is scary. Then you run off with all the money.
I would add that Turkey IS part of NATO, however, and has some privileged trade agreements with the EU.
And as an aside, even though it's far from the most egregious issue here, it seems clear to me they are counting the weight of the chocolate here as well, which is just insanity.
It’s not like he ordered the chocolate a week before the legislation was going to be passed. If they were actually counting the weight (which is individually wrapped bars that are easy to sell) he’d be going away for a much longer time.
Now is 4 years still excessive? IMO yes. Is the judge doing everything he can to delay this person going to prison? It does seem that way.
A conspiracy that there's more than what we see on the surface and in the contracts. Very Trumpy.
I wonder if the conspiracy crowd that follows him will believe this one. Oh wait of course they will, they've bought everything so far, why stop now?
It's the same for the wall. Conspiratorial thinking.
The Trumpists don't have the wall that has been promised will solve all their problems. They really want it because they don't have it. Donnie tells them we need the wall and everything will be better. Guess what, if you get the wall then it won't solve all your problems and make you happy.
So Donnie will have to sell you another story. There's always another sack of magic beans for sale. After every failure there's always some 'thing' more, some other distraction, some other goal. There is no end but things can get really bad as you keep going. Death cults of personality can end up like Jonestown, branch davidians, Heaven’s Gate, Manson family, or Nazi Germany. The next 'thing' and the truth are an ever moving target to con-men. Will these true believers figure out they are being conned before it's too late?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/10/jared-kushner-real-estate-cadre-goldman-sachs?CMP=share_btn_tw
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/10/mcconnell-elaine-chao-1358068?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000014e-f0fe-dd93-ad7f-f8ff7e290000&nlid=630318
Anyone who at this late date is still spouting this "drain the swamp" line have to among least informed people on planet earth. This is a all-you-can-eat buffet of massive, unprecedented corruption 24/7/365. The reason they continue to get away with it is because the scale of it is so unimaginable.
You know what? You'd have a lot more credibility if you didn't say things like 'Jared Kushner is getting $90M' when that clearly is not stated in the referenced article. Neither did McConnell personally get $80M.
People with lots of money do things that involve lots of money. If I were a billionaire I'd probably be dealing with things that apparently you consider 'obscene' amounts of money.
Kushner owns a significant portion of the company. He works in the White House. Chao is the Secretary of Transportation, and she was steering massive projects to Kentucky to bolster her husbands election prospects. But hey, why don't we let everyone who runs every agency and holds every government position use it SPECIFICALLY for personal enrichment and everyone will just shrug their shoulders and move on. Does anyone on the right care AT ALL about these kind of conflicts of interest?? Or are you totally fine with governmental policy benefiting the familes of those in power above all other concerns??
You seem to think that governments haven't been this way since the beginning of civilization. Maybe one of the benefits of having Trump and his cronies in office for a while will be better scrutiny of our politicians in general and maybe some concrete laws that can actually be used to put abusers in prison. We don't have that now because they didn't want that until now, not because it wasn't needed before!
You seem to think that governments haven't been this way since the beginning of civilization. Maybe one of the benefits of having Trump and his cronies in office for a while will be better scrutiny of our politicians in general and maybe some concrete laws that can actually be used to put abusers in prison. We don't have that now because they didn't want that until now, not because it wasn't needed before!