Spirit of Drancy IV

So much outrageous and evil behavior is coming from Trump's version of a war on the poor that I could put up a new post every few hours. By now, I hope, anybody who reads RtO can figure out my itnerpretation without my having to write it out. But Wednesday something important happened.

A United States attorney laid down a marker that will allow us to determine just who the American versions of the Milice are. It was not exactly buried in The Washington Post's story but it was not and has not been emphasized:

“To those who use illegal aliens for a competitive advantage or to make a quick buck, we have something to say to you: If we find you have violated federal criminal law, we are coming for you,” said Mike Hurst, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi. But he declined to comment on whether anyone other than the immigrant workers would be charged as a result of the operation, which he said is ongoing.

I waited a few days to mark this out, in case indictments against the employers were in the mill. Not happening.

They will never happen.

I do not doubt the sincerity of Hurst, but these are charges that will have to be cleared by the Attorney General. Barr will never do it. It would be a spear in the heart of Trump's racist narrative of invasion. (Incidentally, while the word was purged from Trump's twitter file -- evidently by underlings -- the invasion narrative is still the word of the day and of the campaun. When asked, a senior White House accomplice, probably Miller, simply said "No.")

That is why I will be astounded if any of the mployers are prosecuted criminally. They may perhaps be allowed  an Epstein Plea and have to pay civil fines, with a promise to sin no more. Which will put them out of business, so I will be surprised if they are held even to that small an account.  Americans want their chicken nuggets and Trump is not the man to deny them.

Let me offer some ancient history.

I now live in Maryland, home of the delicious Chesapeake Bay blue crab. When I lived in Norfolk 45 years ago, you could buy picked crabmeat. It wasn't cheap but it was available everywhere. Most of the picking was done in Crisfield, Maryland, and the pickers were older black women, illiterate or nearly so with no other opportunities of making money.

Those women are gone now and so are their children. And the children's children have, thanks to the Great Society programs, grown up literate, many going to college. They don't have to pick crabs and they won't.

It is difficult to find picked local crabmeat nowadays and when you do find it it's expensive -- $25 dollars pound for backfin. I asked at the one store that regularly carries it, who picks it? "Hispanics."

But Hispanic immigrants, even illegal ones have better moneymaking opportunities than picking crabs, which is truly unpleasant work. More unpleasant evidently then working in a chicken plant,  which which is unpleasant indeed, as the excellent the Des Moines Register reporter George Anthan detailed in a series more than 30 years ago. (I edited Anthan's stories and thought they deserved the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.)

Or perhaps it's just that chicken plucking is year-round work and crab picking is seasonal.

In any event it is not true that recent immigrants, legal or otherwise, are taking jobs from Americans or depressing Americans' wages. For better or ill, the capitalist dream of forcing the poorest laborers to work for starvation wages -- what David Ricardo understood -- has been short-circuited by our public benefit system that right-wingers call socialist. It is not in any serious sense socialist. But it does have effects on capitalists. It complicates their labor recruitment.

Trump and his fascist friends have no hesitation to inflict sickening horrors on brown children -- you have seen the videos, you do not need me to say anything further -- but they do not and will not have any intention of seeing white employers compelled to submit to the rule of law.

I will be surprised if Mr. Hurst's career as a prosecutor lasts much longer.

Since the first weeks of Trump's regime I have been warning about gleichschaltung. When fascism is done by Americans, as Sinclair Lewis Lewis warned so long ago, it will be done in the name of Americanism. With flags flying.

Enemies of the state will not be proscribed as in Nuremberg laws but will be forced out in the name of efficiency like the scientists at the Department of Agriculture. There've been a few bumps along the road  as when Trump attempted  to install a bootlicking incompetent as director of national intelligence. However, good progress continues to be made.

RtO has noted more than once before that it took Hitler five years to become a dictator.