Establishment Speech

I've noticed a couple of lines that I've heard from both Republicans and Democrats. When you hear a politician or a talk show person saying these words you know they are bought and paid for by the same people behind the scenes.

The last election shows that the American people want both sides to work together

This means that they claim that the American people want to see the government continue to find new ways to divert public funds into large corporations. Of course this is not true, but many American morons will start to believe it because they hear it from people they believe are smarter than themselves.

Everyone agrees that we need immigration reform

This means that we need to increase the number if immigrant workers in this country so that wages will drop. The rich need cheaper workers and since they can't colonize third world nations anymore (investments in those countries are risky due to a government that can't keep control) we need to simply let the mother countries be colonized with a cheaper work force.

Once again, certain people who hear it will believe it because smarter people than themselves are saying it.

I, on the other hand, simply recognize who the messengers speak for by the message that they bring.

Originally posted by Eladar
I've noticed a couple of lines that I've heard from both Republicans and Democrats. When you hear a politician or a talk show person saying these words you know they are bought and paid for by the same people behind the scenes.

[b]The last election shows that the American people want both sides to work together

This means that they claim that the A ...[text shortened]... on the other hand, simply recognize who the messengers speak for by the message that they bring.[/b]

American people want both sides to work together means to pass balanced budgets and work out disagreements in a logical and reasonable manner within the rules of the Constitution to benefit the majority of the people.

Everyone agrees that we need immigration reform means to close the southern border and stop releasing illegal aliens without sufficient punishment.

Originally posted by RJHinds
[b]American people want both sides to work together means to pass balanced budgets and work out disagreements in a logical and reasonable manner within the rules of the Constitution to benefit the majority of the people.

Everyone agrees that we need immigration reform means to close the southern border and stop releasing illegal aliens without sufficient punishment.[/b]

Listen to what they say after those words.

You think they say one thing, but they are saying another.

Show me a politician or political spokesman who agrees with your definition of those terms.

Your point is not without foundation, though I dislike your example. Obama and his administration have form in the abuse of language and are certainly in the pockets of corporate interests - no doubt at all.

http://gu.com/p/43eqh

Let’s say you want to push through a massive programme of anti-democratic corporate protection over two continents. It might be a good idea to festoon your official explanations with tedious-sounding initialisms, acronyms and euphemistic bromides, and with any luck concerned citizens will fall asleep before realising what is going on under their noses.

TTIP – which authorities cutely invite us to pronounce tea-tip – is short for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. It sounds anodyne enough. (Everyone loves a partnership, right?) Its point is, they say, to remove “barriers” or “obstacles” to trade between the continental blocs. Well, who loves a barrier? Who adores the obstacle? As it happens, the normal kinds of trade “barriers”, ie import and export duties (collectively, “tariffs” ), are already very low between the US and EU. So TTIP is focusing on the reduction of “non-tariff barriers”. Well, any kind of barrier is surely still a pesky thing.

Things begin to appear more worrisome when a persistent reader realises that most of the “non-tariff barriers” being targeted by TTIP are regulations: those annoying profit-blocking rules erected by governments to stop their citizens being poisoned or killed, or to prevent rampant pollution. TTIP’s boosters say they just want to make regulations more compatible on both sides of the Atlantic, so that a car manufacturer, say, will not have to pass two different expensive procedures, one for the US and one for the EU, that are aimed at ensuring similar safety levels. The term of art here is regulatory “harmonisation” or “coherence” or “cooperation”. Well, excellent. Who is an enemy of harmony? Who shudders at cooperation?

Perhaps it depends on who is cooperating with whom. Here is where ISDS comes in. It means that private companies will be allowed to sue national governments for doing things that harm their bottom line. Similar provisions in other treaties have already resulted in Philip Morris suing both Uruguay and Australia for enacting anti-smoking legislation, and a Swedish energy company suing Germany for phasing out nuclear power. ISDS could also help the present the government’s fanatical drive to privatise the NHS. The EU, in the minutes</a> of its “Civil Society Dialogue” in June, emphasised that it “does not have a practice of excluding specific economic sectors from ISDS”.

Investor-State Dispute Settlement is a triumphantly boring-sounding name for all this. Let us admire the use of “investor”, rather than “speculator” or, I don’t know, “rapacious corporation that artifically headquarters itself in Luxembourg for the purposes of tax avoidance”. And surely no one is against “dispute settlement”, even though such “disputes” would be arbitrated by unaccountable panels of corporate lawyers.

We are, though, assured by TTIP negotiators that they are consulting “stakeholders” throughout this process. Originally a “stakeholder” was a person who held the stakes (bets) of gamblers: so the stakeholder was the one purely disinterested party. But now “stakeholders” are all those with a stake in the outcome. Curious, then, to discover that the overwhelming majority of “stakeholders” consulted by both the EU and US TTIP bodies have turned out to be, er, corporations and their lobbyists.

However, the official TTIP literature itself relentlessly invokes the modish political virtue of “transparency”. They must mean some kind of perfectly opaque transparency that would surely be of interest to scientists researching new smart materials. Or perhaps, after all, they are just trying to pull some very thick wool over our eyes.

Similar agreements are being pushed by the Americans around the globe. India has had to work hard to be allowed to promise food for its own population!

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/11/14/usindia-wto-agreement-how-corporate-greed-trumps-needs-worlds-poor-and-hungry

If you aren't in the US you probably don't get to hear the establishment types speaking as much as we do over here.

Originally posted by RJHinds
[b]American people want both sides to work together means to pass balanced budgets and work out disagreements in a logical and reasonable manner within the rules of the Constitution to benefit the majority of the people.

Everyone agrees that we need immigration reform means to close the southern border and stop releasing illegal aliens without sufficient punishment.[/b]

Well I agree that what you say in your first paragraph is what "American people want both sides to work together" should mean. The thing is it's the "No true Scotsman" fallacy, if they have opinion poll evidence that that's what people want then fine, but otherwise it's just a way of saying "I can sound like a reasonable guy - vote for me!"

I wonder what you are punishing the illegals for, other than being illegal? Isn't sending them back enough? Do you really want more people in your prisons, the U.S. has a huge prison population?

Originally posted by DeepThought
Well I agree that what you say in your first paragraph is what "American people want both sides to work together" should mean. The thing is it's the "No true Scotsman" fallacy, if they have opinion poll evidence that that's what people want then fine, but otherwise it's just a way of saying "I can sound like a reasonable guy - vote for me!"

I wonder ...[text shortened]... enough? Do you really want more people in your prisons, the U.S. has a huge prison population?

You think we send them back?

Originally posted by Eladar
You think we send them back?

The Obama administration deported a record 438,421 unauthorized immigrants in fiscal year 2013, continuing a streak of stepped up enforcement that has resulted in more than 2 million deportations since Obama took office, newly released Department of Homeland Security data show.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/02/u-s-deportations-of-immigrants-reach-record-high-in-2013/

Originally posted by Eladar
If you aren't in the US you probably don't get to hear the establishment types speaking as much as we do over here.

It has conquered the world.

In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In Britain, an era of weary consensualist politics was displaced by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, whose ambition was to reassert 'Victorian values'. In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1,300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the twentieth century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History.What colonised the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo. Modernity was challenged by a gruesome alliance of pre-modernists and post-modernists, medieval theocrats and New Age mystics. It was as if the Enlightenment had never happened.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra

The Obama administration deported a record 438,421 unauthorized immigrants in fiscal year 2013, continuing a streak of stepped up enforcement that has resulted in more than 2 million deportations since Obama took office, newly released Department of Homeland Security data show.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/02/u-s-deportations-of-immigrants-reach-record-high-in-2013/

A drop in the bucket. How many did he spread throughout the US bringing with them diseases that have killed our children?

Originally posted by finnegan
It has conquered the world.

In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In Britain, an era of weary consensualist politics was displaced by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, whose ambition was to reassert 'Victorian values'. In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that ha ...[text shortened]... dieval theocrats and New Age mystics. It was as if the Enlightenment had never happened.

Your eyes are blind if you think the establishment types are limited to one political party.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra

The Obama administration deported a record 438,421 unauthorized immigrants in fiscal year 2013, continuing a streak of stepped up enforcement that has resulted in more than 2 million deportations since Obama took office, newly released Department of Homeland Security data show.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/02/u-s-deportations-of-immigrants-reach-record-high-in-2013/

http://cis.org/ICE-Illegal-Immigrant-Deportations

Key Findings:
•The number of deportations resulting from interior enforcement by ICE declined by 19 percent from 2011 to 2012, and is on track to decline another 22 percent in 2013.


•In 2012, the year the Obama administration claimed to break enforcement records, more than one-half of removals attributed to ICE were the result of Border Patrol arrests that would never have been counted as a removal in prior years. In 2008, under the Bush administration, only one-third of removals were from Border Patrol arrests.


•Total deportations in 2011, the latest year for which complete numbers are available, numbered 715,495 – the lowest level since 1973. The highest number of deportations on record was in 2000, under the Clinton administration, when 1,864,343 aliens were deported.


•When claiming record levels of enforcement, the Obama administration appears to count only removals, which are just one form of deportation, and only a partial measure of enforcement. Beginning in 2011, a shift of some of the routine Border Patrol case load to ICE enabled the administration to count an artificially high number of removals.


•Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the division of ICE that is responsible for work site enforcement, combating transnational gangs, overstay enforcement, anti-smuggling and trafficking activity, and busting document and identity theft rings, now contributes very little to immigration enforcement. In 2013 HSI has produced only four percent of ICE deportations, making just a few thousand arrests per year throughout the entire country.


•ICE is doing less enforcement with more resources. Despite reporting more encounters in 2013 than 2012, ICE agents pursued deportation of 20 percent fewer aliens this year than last.


•Enforcement activity declined in every ICE field office from 2011 to 2013, with the biggest declines in the Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Washington DC/Virginia, and Houston field offices.


•Criminal alien arrests declined by 11 percent from 2012 to 2013, despite the completion of the Secure Communities program, which generates more referrals of arrested aliens than ever before. ICE agents took a pass on hundreds of thousands of aliens who were arrested by local authorities in those years.


•ICE is carrying a case load of 1.8 million aliens who are either in removal proceedings or have already been ordered removed. Less than two percent are in detention, which is the only proven way to ensure departure.


•As of the end of July 2013 there were 872,000 aliens – nearly half of ICE’s total docket – who had been ordered removed but who had not left the country.


•The State Department continues to issue tens of thousands of visas annually to citizens of countries that refuse to take back their countrymen who are ordered removed from the United States. Many of these are violent criminals.

Originally posted by Eladar
http://cis.org/ICE-Illegal-Immigrant-Deportations

Key Findings:
•The number of deportations resulting from interior enforcement by ICE declined by 19 percent from 2011 to 2012, and is on track to decline another 22 percent in 2013.


•In 2012, the year the Obama administration claimed to break enforcement records, more than one-half of removals attrib ...[text shortened]... countrymen who are ordered removed from the United States. Many of these are violent criminals.

This is amusing; essentially you have a right wing group bitching that the present administration is concentrating on securing the border rather than stressing interior enforcement at the expense of border security! And that the very high levels of illegal immigrants ordered to be removed but who's cases have not been finalized somehow means that pursuing these numbers of cases is somehow not enforcing immigration laws. That there are 1.8 million aliens in removal proceedings or already ordered to be removed is an extraordinarily high level of enforcement; that only 2% are in physical custody is quite understandable given the lack of existing capacity for housing them.

The report is riddled with such inconsistencies and illogic.

Originally posted by Eladar
Your eyes are blind if you think the establishment types are limited to one political party.

To admit this would mean that they are no longer a partisan hack.


Good luck with that. 😵