The Green Spot

Environmentalists refer to a problem with the basic mindset of people who don't get the concept of The Commons, and more particularly, The Tragedy Of The Commons - where people move to a place that has "plenty to go around" (land, resources, etc), and immediately start ruining it all for everybody by trying to monopolize whatever they can. When it's all used up - when it's depleted and brown - they move on, looking for the next Green Spot.

Considering Economics and Politics, there's never a shortage of Brown Spots - places where Plutocrats and their coin-operated politicians have turned the joint into a wasteland - little more than a system of lords and serfs.

(ed note: I wish there was another way to characterize the phenomenon, because I don't want to associate the "brown" in Brown Spots when I talk about environmental stuff, with the "brown" in Brown People when I talk about Econ and Politics)

So here we are again, faced with having to deal with some of our own shit coming back to haunt us (a hundred years of Gunboat Diplomacy, Shock Doctrine Economics, and Ollie North-style fuckery) all through Latin America.

We've helped to make it very difficult for brown people to survive in their own countries, so they're migrating to the Green Spot here in USAmerica Inc, and we're so freaked out that we're actually in process of turning this joint into the kind of Brown Spot that would be less attractive to them.

At the very least, we're doing everything we can think of to send the message that we're no different than the assholes they're risking their lives to escape. 

We're the bartender at some redneck dive at 2am. "Closin' time - you don't have to go home, but ya can't stay here." Then he turns on the light, and you make a mental note to get a tetanus booster, but that takes me off towards a slightly different rant.

The New Yorker:

Donald Trump, who’s been stumping for congressional Republicans, is now calling the November midterms the “election of the caravan,” and says that the Democrats support the “illegal immigration onslaught” because they “figure everybody coming in is going to vote Democrat.” For his Administration, the political rhetoric and the policy agenda are effectively indistinguishable. In the last several months, over the objections of regional experts and diplomatic staff, officials at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have wound down a number of programs meant to provide legal relief to those seeking refuge in the U.S. This summer, Attorney General Jeff Sessions unilaterally redrew decades of jurisprudence to make it significantly more difficult for migrants fleeing gang violence and domestic abuse to seek asylum. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of migrants from Central America continue to stream north, fleeing conditions that the Trump Administration has dismissedas irrelevant.

For all the Administration’s avowals of toughness, none of its strategies has helped stem the flow. According to unpublished government data obtained by the Washington Post, Border Patrol has apprehended more than a hundred thousand migrant family members in the last year, which is about thirty thousand more arrests than the previous peak, in 2016. The rationale for the President’s harshest measures, from the indefinite detention of asylum seekers to the separation of families at the border, was that they would deter other migrants from making the trip. The government’s own data contradicts that, and so Trump’s enforcement policy is stuck in a feedback loop: he’s been defending actions that haven’t changed migration patterns, while simultaneously citing a “border crisis” as the reason to double down.


In the end - and we have news about it today - we'll do our usual bullshit "conservative" thing ('specially now that Cult45 is in charge) by announcing our intentions to punish those countries. 

We'll cut Foreign Aid. Because we're all about retribution, and the GOP likes nothing more than making people suffer.

We have a problem with immigration because people want to get away from the shit in their lives, but we refuse to do what needs done in order to make those people stronger in their own countries - so they have a real chance to make their own lives better wherever they are - so we don't have to sponsor them here.

(*) GOP politicians are always pushing to cut Foreign Aid
- for farmers, which means they have to resort to growing drug crops instead of food crops.
- for local schools, which means they fall further into the cycle of ignorance poverty and crime.
- for governments, which makes them vulnerable to the influence of terrorists.

Republicans are weak on Drugs
Republicans are weak on Crime
Republicans are weak on Terrorism

And it should be easier and easier now to see how weak Republicans are on Immigration.

(*) hat tip = The West Wing