Trump To Try Threadbare Policies Which Already Failed
Trump is the perfect toxic brew for millions of Americans whose feelings of being ignored, belittled and mocked by Congress have festered for years and who are desperate for the promises of a savior and a magical cure.
And then there are the millions who understand that now is exactly the wrong time for a pretend leader who is a failed, amoral businessman who will shred the Constitution to fit his needs and who will stop at nothing to enrich his personal fortune.
Trump is nothing beyond the shell of charisma and the false image of a powerful leader that he has honed. In fact, he has offered nothing new under the sun and instead insists on regurgitating the failed past.
He has bloviated on four primary issues: Undocumented immigrants, imposing draconian tariffs, punishing his opponents and cutting taxes for the wealthy. Past Presidents have supported similar measures with largely negative results.
Forget about the fake issues trump floats to get headlines and air play take attention away from his core issues. Don’t waste time listening to his plan to annex Canada or Iceland; or his plan to stop the war in Ukraine in one day; or pardoning all of the Jan. 7 felons; invade Mexico; or dismantle the Department of Education.
Trump has threatened to push his protectionist “America First” policies by initiating massive trade tariffs on goods coming from China, Mexico and Canada.
Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, which raised tariffs on thousands of imported goods. The act led to retaliatory tariffs from other countries, resulting in a trade war. Many countries imposed their own tariffs on American goods, which reduced international trade.
The tariffs increased the costs of imported goods, which hurt American consumers and businesses that relied on foreign products. The growing costs contributed to the worsening of the Great Depression.
The decrease in trade and economic activity led to bank failures, particularly in agricultural regions. International trade plummeted by about 65 percent between 1929 and 934.
Overall, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act is widely regarded as a factor that exacerbated the economic downturn of the Great Depression. It’s a classic example of how protectionist policies can have unintended negative consequences.
Franklin D. Roosevelt initially focused on domestic economic recovery during the Great Depression. In 1934, he signed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA), which marked a significant shift towards trade liberalization. The RTAA allowed the President to negotiate bilateral trade agreements that reduced tariffs on a reciprocal basis, a response to the economic chaos created by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.
Trump also is the latest but not the first to weaponize the government to punish his political enemies. Richard Nixon infamously used government agencies to target political enemies. The result was ultimately the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation.
Again, trump is simply the latest President to cut taxes for the richest of Americans under the guise that the cuts will “trickle down” as big business uses their savings to promote growth.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 under trump reduced the corporate tax rate and lowered individual tax rates, with significant benefits for the wealthiest Americans. Middle and lower-income Americans saw some tax relief but the largest benefits went to the wealthiest individuals and businesses. The tax cuts have exacerbated income inequality and have not led to the “trickle down” benefits to lower-income Americans.
Ronald Reagan’s Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 significantly reduced the top marginal tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent. It was great for the rich, lousy for the rest.
The George W. Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 lowered the top income tax rate and provided substantial benefits to high-income earners. Again, the rich got richer at the expense of the rest.
Undocumented Immigrants
Trump wants to spend billions and use the military to round up millions of undocumented immigrants and house them in sprawling detention camps in preparation for deportation. The cost of the camps, the constitutionality of such a roundup, the places for deportation and the impacts on farmers and others who rely heavily on low-wage migrant workers, are still open ended, as are much of trump’s politically motivated and poorly conceived ideas.
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham already has purchased a 1,402-acre plot of land for $3.8 million and has offered it to the incoming trump administration to use for immigration detention facilities.
Operation Wetback
Trump has said he will pattern his ethnic cleansing after Operation Wetback which was the largest mass deportation in American history, a draconian effort that included sweeping up and deporting as many 1.3 million people. Largely driven by racism, the effort dwarfed another U.S. attempted genocide, the so-called “Trail of Tears” in which, by 1840, tens of thousands of Native Americans had been driven off of their land in the southeastern states and forced to move across the Mississippi to Indian Territory. Thousands of Native Americans died during the forced trek.
Bigotry has fed a widespread belief among Americans that Mexicans came to the United States to steal jobs from American workers. In reality, many were invited to the country to work in the fields and were paid barely subsistence wages under the U.S. Mexican Farm Labor program, known as Operation Bracero after the Spanish term for “manual labor.” Beginning in 1942, the program funneled Mexicans into the United States on a legal, temporary basis in exchange for guaranteed wages.
An estimated 4.6 million Mexicans entered the country through the Bracero Program between 1942 and 1964, and states like California soon became dependent on bracero workers. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers crossed the border without permission and found jobs on the farms of employers willing to flout the law.
In the early 1950s, newly-elected President Dwight Eisenhower reacted to the growing, politicized enmity against undocumented immigrants and authorized a widespread roundup called “Operation Wetback,” using a slur that referred to illegal entrants who supposedly entered the United States by swimming the Rio Grande. The phrase was soon applied generally to Mexican laborers, including those who were legal residents.
Using words familiar in the current effort to force out immigrants, Herbert Brownell Jr., Eisenhower’s first attorney general, said that America “was faced with a breakdown in law enforcement on a very large scale. When I say large scale, I mean hundreds of thousands were coming in from Mexico [every year] without restraint.”
The immigration program employed military-style tactics to remove immigrants, including many who were American citizens. Millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs like the Bracero program and some were naturalized citizens. Operation Wetback was designed to send them all to Mexico.
The Handbook of Texas Online reported to Eisenhower that the illegal workforce had a severe impact on the wages of ordinary working Americans. The Handbook Online reported that a study found in 1950 that cotton growers in the Rio Grande Valley, where most undocumented migrants in Texas worked, paid wages that were “approximately half” the farm wages paid elsewhere in the state.
The report also led Eisenhower to consider how illegal labor lead to corruption among Border Patrol agents who funneled the workers to farms and ranches. At the time, politically powerful people were fueling the flow of undocumented migrants. One example involved Joseph White, a retired 21-year veteran of the Border Patrol. White said that in the early 1950s, some senior U.S. officials overseeing immigration enforcement “had friends among the ranchers,” and agents “did not dare” arrest their illegal workers.
In 1954, Eisenhower appointed retired Gen. Joseph “Jumpin’ Joe” Swing, a veteran of the 101st Airborne, as the new Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) commissioner.
Powerful members of congress, including Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson, D-Texas, and Sen. Pat McCarran, D-Nev., favored open borders, and did not want strong border enforcement. But General Swing was able to shield Eisenhower and the Border Patrol from interference by powerful political and corporate interests.
Harlon B. Carter, who led the U.S. Border Patrol, convinced Eisenhower to intensify deportations. Carter’s disdain for migrants was longstanding. Carter lived in Texas, when on March 3, 1931, the 17-year-old Carter shot and killed 15-year-old Ramón Casiano. Carter believed that Casiano had information about the theft of his family’s car, and, carrying a shotgun, he pointed it at Casiano and demanded that he return to the Carter home to submit to questioning. When Casiano refused Carter shot him dead. No evidence tying Casiano with the car incident was ever found. Carter was convicted of murder, but the conviction was overturned by the Texas Court of Appeals, which found that the judge in the case had issued incorrect jury instructions regarding laws related to self-defense.[6]
Carter rose through the ranks and commanded the entire border patrol from 1950 through 1957 where he led Operation Wetback. From 1961 to 1970, Carter directed the Southwestern region of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He retired from government service in 1970 and in1977 was elected executive vice president of the NRA.
The plights of the deportees reflected those of Africans who were stolen from their homes and forced onto overcrowded, disease infested ships to take the enslaved people to the U.S.
Those apprehended under Operation Wetback were often deported without being able to recover their property in the United States, or to contact their families prior to deportation. Once in Mexico, many of the immigrants struggled to find their way home or to continue to support their families in the U.S.
Tens of thousands of Mexicans were put aboard two hired ships, the Emancipation and the Mercurio. The ships ferried the aliens from Port Isabel, Texas, to Vera Cruz, Mexico, more than 500 miles south. In Texas, 25 percent of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease and other causes while in custody.
Others were crowded onto buses and trains to take many of them to unfamiliar places, deep within Mexico before being set free. Deportees often were stranded without any food or employment when they were released in Mexico. They faced extreme conditions in their country; 88 deported workers died in the 112 °F heat in July 1955.
To avoid repeated illegal border crossings, certain Border Patrol agents had the heads of repeat offenders shaved to more easily identify them. There were reports of beating and jailing chronically offending undocumented immigrants before they were deported. Most complaints concerning deportation were undocumented, but more than 11,000 formal complaints were lodged or about 1 percent of all actions from 1954 through 1964.
Throughout the years of Operation Wetback, border recruitment of illegal workers by American growers continued, largely because of the low cost of illegal labor, and the growers’ desire to avoid bureaucratic obstacles of immigration. The continuation of illegal immigration, along with public outcry over many U.S. citizens removed, was largely responsible for the failure of the Operation Wetback program and it eventual lost funding and was ended.
Operation Wetback began on June 17, 1954. At the time, there were believed to be 12 million to 20 million undocumented migrants in the U.S. An estimated 85 percent of Mexicans working and living in the U.S. were undocumented.
The operation included the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, but the main targets were border areas in Texas and California.
Around 750 agents swept northward in California through agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions a day. By the end of July, more than 50,000 aliens were caught and another 488,000, fearing arrest, had fled the country. By mid-July, the crackdown extended into Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Texas. By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas, and an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 undocumented migrants left Texas voluntarily.
The fast-moving effort to secure America’s borders was considered a success as Illegal migration dropped 95 percent by the late 1950s.
The continuation of illegal immigration, despite Operation Wetback, along with public outcry over the many U.S. citizens removed, was largely responsible for the failure of the program. Operation Wetback lasted for about a year from 1954 to 1955, when funding was unceremoniously canceled.