Originally published at: Trump Official Suggests Replacing Deported Farm Workers with Medicaid Enrollees - TPM – Talking Points Memo
There are several layers to my conclusion that today’s remarks from President Trump’s agriculture secretary are among the most creatively maniacal I’ve heard yet from the administration. “There’s been a lot of noise in the last few days and a lot of questions about where the president stands and his vision for farm labor,” Agriculture…
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It’s the cruelty. It’s always the fucking cruelty. I’d like to see that miserable fucking **** in a farm field picking produce under the hot sun. She wouldn’t last 5 minutes.
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Bondage, Noembrain, and now this nitwit. This is why they ask stupid questions of beauty pageant contestants. My 93-year-old mother was on Medicaid before she died because the nursing home had bled her dry. She had dementia and couldn’t walk. My 78-year-old brother with schizophrenia is in a group home paid for by Medicaid. This stupid and cruel women thinks this is the answer? God help us.
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Medicaid recipients working in the fields? At illegal immigrant wages? Or maybe NO wages, since they’re getting “free” medical care? What could go wrong?
Well, I don’t have the percentage breakdowns, but a huge number of those “lazy layabouts eating cheetos” yada yada are:
- Actually employed, but their jobs don’t provide a medical plan (who knew?!?) and don’t pay enough to lift them out of poverty
- Are small children
- Are elderly
- Are actually and truly disabled or otherwise sick
But one can be so much surer of one’s rightness when one is ignorant, right? 81 mil Americans would agree!
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Honestly, as the guardrails of democracy fall or fail to perform as advertised, it increasingly may be the incompetence of democracy’s foes that saves us. Not saying it will barring efforts against it but dang there’s an awful lot of stupid at the top of the US fascist pyramid.
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And it’s up to us to exploit it! Thanks for that note of hope!
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Let’s be straight about this: Approximately zero US-born citizens will work in a field for healthcare. If they don’t need the healthcare, they won’t do it. If they do need the healthcare, they likely can’t do it. It’s pretty easy to imagine Trump staffing farms by nonvoluntary means, and if it really does come to that, I can’t imagine the Supreme Court or Congress saying boo about it.
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The creators of AI made it to take away graphic design jobs and write student papers, not put it to the kind of work humans have to do as a last desperate measure to feed their families.
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Like renting prisoners out to farms?
And to prevent the prisoners from escaping, chain them together?
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If they’re talking about sending 34 million people down to the countryside in public, you don’t need to think too hard to figure what they want to do with all the other Medicaid recipients.
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Trump: “I’m going to bring New York back. I love New York.”
“In fact, I love it so much I moved away cuz I hated it so much,” he added.
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“People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Alternatively, they could nab some of those purported freeloaders (child-free, able bodied adults between the ages of 19 and 64) on Medicaid who will soon have to complete work requirements (at least 80 hours per month of work, volunteering, education, or training) in order to access health care, thanks to Trump’s disastrous, Medicaid-slashing megabill.
JFC, this is beyond what Pol Pot did in Cambodia. Pol’s idea of paradise was strictly agrarian sustenance farming with a strong disdain for education. Elementary school teachers were considered intellectuals in Pol’s world. I have photos from Phnom Penh too gruesome to post here of where the logical extension of these policies land.
Read ‘A Cambodian Odyssey’ by Haing Ngor if you think it can’t happen here. He’s better known as the actor from ‘The Killing Fields’.
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I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that movie. Chain gangs were a thing during the 60’s and 70’s in the deep south. You could see them alongside the interstate doing whatever work somebody thought needed doing.
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“Ultimately, the answer on this is automation, also some reform within the current governing structure, and then, also, when you think about there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program, there are plenty of workers in America,” she continued."
So all those so called freeloaders will move from their beloved city (at their own expense) to the rural farm area just for the harvest season so they can keep their medicaid? And where do they live during the winter months?
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Do the reactionaries believe that they can order American workers to take certain jobs, you know, like they’re in a gulag or something?
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I’m going to say it again.
We need to stop reacting to every psychotic thing these Nazis say. Instead, the Democrats need to adopt the position that no one will escape judgement for their crimes. Float the legal position that any pardons meted out would be part of an existing corrupt conspiracy and therefore will not be honored. Then make it clear that the prosecutions will start the moment they retake the House and Senate, and no one will be spared. They will not rest until every single crime and perpetrator has been prosecuted. This will have a two-fold effect. One, it will show some fight in the Democrats. And two, it will make MAGA start looking over THEIR shoulders and reacting for once.
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I guess we are coming up to the magic loogie moment in this administration.
(Click through for video)
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Some Good News
Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world’s leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content.
(Cloudflare)
Cloudflare is the big tech company that protects lots of websites. The complete article at the link gives a nice background on the issue. Personally, I consider this a fantastically promising development.
Content creators deserve money for labor.
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“The problem is, when you do another party, especially if you’re running on some of the issues that he talks about, you know, that would end up — if he funds Senate candidates and House candidates in competitive races, that would likely end up meaning the Democrats would win all the competitive Senate and House races,” DeSantis said Monday evening.
Aw man, that is tough. I feel for them.
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