Leid Stories - The Expendables At The Border Serve Multiple Political Purposes - 07/21/14
Just about everyone in Washington is lying to and among themselves and to the nation about what they variously have described as an “immigration problem,” “illegal aliens crossing the border,” “an urgent humanitarian situation,” and “a surge of unaccompanied children.”
Whatever they call it, one thing is clear: No one will use the R-word—Refugees.
Republicans and Democrats have found common ground. They’re reviving parts of the 2008 Helping Unaccompanied Minors and Alleviating National Emergency (HUMANE) Act so as to categorize the children as trafficked persons, thereby skirting international (and national) laws on refugees’ rights. All the while, they hide their high-handed misdeeds behind contrived concerns about those rights.
The task at hand is to sell the big lie that good old-fashioned bipartisan wrangling between Congress and the Obama administration is producing a just solution. But that lie follows a series of other lies, also arrived at in bipartisan fashion.
Votes, not victims, are their top priority in this political season, and so the abject misery of tens of thousands of refugees snared at the border becomes a useful, campaign-worthy opportunity to sell the electorate on ideological differences between candidates and their parties. The refugees are quite expendable.
Leid Stories tells the truth about their lies. And James Petras, a Bartle professor (emeritus) of sociology at Binghamton University, New York, discusses the “golden era” of predatory U.S. and corporate policies and actions that laid the groundwork for the mass-migration from Central America that we are witnessing today.
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