dagblog - Comments for ""Operation Wetback"?"

Thank you, Peracles.

barefooted — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 03:26:49 +0000

In reply to Lessee, completely racist &

Thank you, Peracles. Sincerely.

Vox has an excellent report

barefooted — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 03:24:16 +0000

In reply to The bracero program doesn't

Vox has an excellent report up detailing the operation and many of the lesser known details. It's worth a read if you're at all interested in the subject.

Yeah, Jerzy Kosinski's The

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 17:04:42 +0000

In reply to PP - likely the major problem

Yeah, Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird describes a lot of this, even though he made it up & it wasn't autobiographical after all. The original "truthiness" guy, but brilliant (and suicidal). Lars van Trier is simply a manic genius (and afraid of airplanes, so will never be famous in America)

PP - likely the major problem

NCD — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 16:28:37 +0000

In reply to Nice link on the Japanese.

PP - likely the major problem with a Jap-American unit in the Pacific would be having them mistaken as the enemy or spies by US forces accustomed to kill every Jap as a requirement for survival.

Thanks for the link on the film, looks intriguing.

I have read Savage Continent, about post WW2 pan-Europe pogroms, blood feuds, revolution and ethnic conflict, and the 80's Escape from Sobibor, about the escape of hundreds of Jews from a death camp in Poland after they wiped out most of the SS guards.

The latter book gives an account of a surviving escapee Jew who after escape fought Polish national resistance groups and Nazi's with a Jewish resistance group. Both the Free Polish Resistance and the Nazi's were after any stray Jews. The Jewish escapee post-war was almost killed when he tried to return to his Polish village by Poles intent on robbing him, they had already disassembled his house and dug up his garden looking for loot. Perhaps the sole real Christian in town saved his life by hiding him.

Living in Brazil after escaping Europe, he was quoted by the book's author in an interview saying he hated Poles more than Germans ....a surprising remark, giving the impression that Europe was a confusing paradoxical cauldron of hate and violence after WW2.

A dark era that is rarely ever touched on in our usual movies, history sources and books, but apparently is in the Europa film.

Lessee, completely racist &

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 11:12:21 +0000

In reply to Thank you for that, but do

Lessee, completely racist & exploitive program that hurt our reputation and moral conscience, hurting our reputation throughout Latin America, while ignoring the long-term symbiotic relationship of Mexican workers & US production needs, along with the basic humanitarian aspect of people just trying to move where they can better succeed and care for their families - not an evil intention by any means, one that's natural and should be applauded.

It was this situation that I thought NAFTA would address, and one of my annoyances with the left on trade.

First, the left is frequently hypocritical - there's a lot of protectionism on the left at the same time it wants to "help" the 3rd world, which presumably means concerts and telethons rather than actually sharing the wealth and dealing with job insecurity at home to help grow jobs & economies abroad in structurally impoverished 3rd world countries especially.

Second, our immigration "policy" is stupid - it turned into a predominately Mexican (about 50%), but poor Mexican primarily, rather than a more balanced melting pot influx from around the world, bolstered by a ton of illegal immigration (stablized a bit) as well as a Mexican-American birthrate that dwarfs the birthrate in Mexico. The results have been perverse - we still talk about "diversity" even when referring to majority Hispanic. The spread across the country has some huge changes - Elgin & Aurora Illinois and Hartford Connecticut both have over 40% Hispanic populations. Providence, Rhode Island's at 38%, while Springfield Mass is 35%, Bridgeport Connecticut 33%, Newark NJ 32%. Where are the Ethiopians, Indonesians, Chilenos, Burmese, Algerians, Bulgarians? It's 2015, we have planes.

Third, while NAFTA has had problems, and hopefully Hillary's sincere in seeing need to improve protections in trade deals from Korea to TPP to NAFTA & CAFTA, there's a lot that seems to be right to the idea of building up Mexico's own production and high-tech industry and to finding equitable ways to increase agricultural trade - sadly the segment that failed the most in this agreement. What isolationists seem to claim is that Mexico would have done much better without NAFTA, and thus oppose most trade deals. This ignores issues like the rise of China as huge manufacturing partner - substituting a good deal for what worked for Mexico in the 1960-1980's period. This paper claims that the timing was also poor for Mexico being too tied to the US during fitful economic performance (1995, 2001, 2008) - while the rest of Latin America grew at twice that rate - whether lacking NAFTA would have changed that, I don't know. The dishonesty of the US in implementing NAFTA is also a big deal - 15 years after the agreement, the US was still resisting letting Mexican trucks drive into the US, costing them expensive & time-consuming transfers to US trucks. Where else we screwed them in implementation is subject to research, but I'm sure we tilted it. A good NAFTA summary here. But the biggest questions remain in how to structure & enforce fair global trade - not to cut down on trade or shift back to regulations-less trade that created our exploitation zones down south for 150 years. Hopefuly Hillary has evolved on this & will seek out more effective ways to tackle these problems than standard free trade cant and WTO/IMF bumbling - India managed to get some traction in its offshored IT industry over the last 20 years. Low margin, high sweat industries like textiles will be harder to make riches in.

I think there was amore, but have other pressing matters.

Thank you for that, but do

barefooted — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 06:37:02 +0000

In reply to Nice link on the Japanese.

Thank you for that, but do you have anything to say on-topic? Yours was a voice I was hoping to hear, among others.

The bracero program doesn't

barefooted — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 06:27:02 +0000

In reply to I am still looking but here:

The bracero program doesn't seem much different than the modern worker visa. Not in it's vision, implementation, or eventual problematic lack of follow-up upon expiration. Nowadays we've added H2 visas to adapt our needs beyond agriculture but still seem uneasy and inept regarding permanence.

And frankly, reports from the time are too politically kind.

Nice link on the Japanese.

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 06:14:51 +0000

In reply to Keep in mind that just 6

Nice link on the Japanese.

Ignoring for a moment all the racist laws against Japanese land owning & citizenship, do you think there were any grounds to be worried that a greater number of Japanese-Americans signing up for the military might by sympathetic to the Emperor and potential traitors/saboteurs among the ranks? If so, what would be the best way to vet this or provide more assurance?

[actually, considering the extreme racism towards Japanese immigrants in the early 1900's, it might be expected many would be pissed off and sympathetic towards the homeland]

Obviously the unit fighting in Europe did very well - might we assume the situation would have been the same in the Pacific? the same for mainland Japanese-Americans? [conditions for Japanese in Hawaii were significantly better]

And what does this inform us of future conflicts with other groups? The 3 underage Brit girls who slipped off to join ISIS with help of their local mosques was certainly a shock to the UK. It's easy to say "all discrimination bad", but do we learn any guidance on what's hateful discrimination and what's prudent precaution?

BTW - great movie on German sympathy & the imperatives of choosing - Europa (Zentropa)

Thank you, NCD, for adding

barefooted — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 06:03:51 +0000

In reply to Keep in mind that just 6

Thank you, NCD, for adding historical context that shouldn't be ignored. It shows where our country's "head" was, and where it might frighteningly be once again.

No one could have summed it

NCD — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 04:58:44 +0000

In reply to We as a people have 'id'

No one could have summed it up more clearly.

Nutshell: We must do our best in order to become something more.

Trump does not meet that standard. No Republican in their traveling snake oil and medicine show does.