Sunday, March 19, 2017

Woo Hoo! Party Like It's 1939!


I came across this invitation for a party in the Northwoods of Wisconsin on Facebook:
THIS SUNDAY-TOMORROW!! KIM SIMAC-Northwoods Patriots & Concerned Women For America is our Keynote Speaker! Jeffrey Mursau, our 36th District Assemblyman will share what's happening in the WI State Legislature and Judge Robert Kennedy Jr. will speak about the President's Immigration Ban. There will also be Raffles & good food! Come and help us Celebrate this time in our history.
There is so much wrong with this short paragraph that it'll never be right.

First off, there is the irony of a judge named Robert Kennedy speaking at such an event.

Long time readers of Cog Dis might remember Kim Simac's name. She is teabagger that ran for office during the recall election against Democratic Wisconsin State Senator Jim Holperin. During her brief run, we learned that she doesn't like to pay taxes and can't spell worth a damn. We also learned that despite her poor spelling, she did write a pro-gun children's book called, "With My Rifle By My Side."

But the biggest question in my mind is what the hell are thy celebrating? The attacks on people for their skin color, their religion, their gender and/or their sexual orientation? That's not really a time in our history. It's more like a nightmarish reenactment of 1939 Nazi Germany.

Maybe they're celebrating the fact that a great many of them - the dairy farmers - are suffering under Trump's repeated attempts at an immigration ban:
Now living with their two young children on a Pepin County dairy farm in northwestern Wisconsin where Manuel works, the couple — who asked that their real names not be used because of their immigration status — are making plans to leave their life in America’s Dairyland and go back across the border, much sooner than they had expected.

They are among the estimated 51 percent of all dairy workers in the United States who are immigrants. A significant portion — more than three-fourths of the workers at some dairy farms according to workers, farmers and industry experts — are undocumented after entering the country illegally or overstaying visas.

Like the JimĂ©nez family, some now live in fear of deportation because of vows by President Donald Trump — who in November used a strong showing in rural areas to become thefirstRepublican presidentialcandidateto carry Wisconsin since 1984 — to crack down on undocumented immigrants. It’s unclear how many immigrants working on dairy farms in Wisconsin are here illegally.

Dairy producers in Wisconsin increasingly struggle to recruit and maintain the immigrant workforce on which the state’s $43 billion-a-year dairy industry relies, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism found in interviews this month with farmers, workers and industry experts.

Farmers say deporting immigrants working here illegally could harm Wisconsin’s signature industry, which ranks second in the nation for milk production and first for cheese. Milking cows can be a dirty, physically demanding job that includes long, irregular work hours; farmers say few Americans are willing to do it.
Or maybe their celebrating that even more of them are going to go bankrupt before succumbing to any major illness, thanks to Ryancare (or Trumpcare, if you prefer):
No congressional district in Wisconsin delivered a bigger victory margin for Donald Trump last fall (20 points) than the rural northern one represented by Republican Sean Duffy.

But by one key measure, no district in Wisconsin would lose more health care aid under the GOP plan to replace Obamacare.

Wisconsin is part of a national pattern in which the Obamacare enrollees who appear to be hit the hardest by the Republican plan fit the demographic and geographic profile of Trump’s political base.

These enrollees are in their 50s and early 60s. Trump won that group by 15 points in Wisconsin, according to exit polling.

And they disproportionately live in rural areas that voted for Trump and are represented by Republicans in Congress.
Being this kind of stupid has gotta be a pre-existing condition, so they wouldn't have been covered on that under Ryancare anyway.

But try as I might, I cannot fathom that much hatred, racism and bigotry that one would be willing to celebrate their own demise because of it.

1 comment:

  1. Here is something to consider in discussing the dairy worker situation. When workers are illegal how do they do their payroll? You MUST have an SSN in order to withhold FICA taxes and do withholding. So, unless they have fake or borrowed SSNs you cant legally pay them much less cover them by statutoriallly required Workman's Comp.
    When I investigated a non-farm case here where an illegal worker was killed I found that the contractor (Republican city alderman Mike Howe) was laundering his payroll through a fake sub-conctractor and evading all taxes and insurance and pocketing the difference.
    If the percentages are as high as you report then the dairy industry and similar things are going on then its easy to see why they would be upset by this as the discount owed to tax and regulatory evasion is enormous!
    While I agree that Trump's approach is wrong the irony of cross purposes between Trump and his business based support is rather stunning.
    Then consider that with these same mega-dairies controlling most of the production today that even if organizations like Farm Bureau oppose him, the current rural Trump constituency who are the descendants of the now dispossessed family farmers whose operations were swallwed up by these employers and whose labor was replaced by the illegals have a very different view even after these mega-units install high capacity wells and pollute the shallow residential wells with their waste.
    I have to admit a certain level of guilty pleasure in watching the developing chaos! :P

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