A century ago, anti-immigrant backlash almost closed America’s doors

Many of us wouldn't be here if the US embraced anti-immigrant bigotry

Matthew Smith, Miami University

Immigrant children at Ellis Island in New York, 1908.
 National Archives/Wikimedia Commons

One hundred years ago, the U.S. Congress enacted the most notorious immigration legislation in American history. Signed by President Calvin Coolidge, the Immigration Act of 1924 dramatically reduced immigration from eastern and southern Europe and practically barred it from Asia.

How the law did this, however, was somewhat subtle: a quota. 

Lawmakers calculated how many immigrants from each European country were residing in the United States in 1890 and then took 2% of that number. 

Only that many newcomers could be admitted from any particular country each year. Before the end of the 19th century, the number of immigrants from outside western and northern Europe was still relatively small – meaning their 2% quotas would be minuscule.

In short, the Immigration Act was unabashedly racist, seeking to roll back the demographic tide. One of its sponsors, U.S. Rep. Albert Johnson, warned the House Committee on Immigration that “a stream of alien blood” was poisoning the nation.

Torn between “the American dream” and fears of an ungovernable “melting pot,” Americans have always viewed immigrants ambivalently. In 1924, as is true today, many citizens thought in terms of “good” immigration versus “bad” immigration. In their minds, 1890 marked a dividing line between the two.

Looking back as a historian of immigration and religion, I’m struck by three changes in U.S. views of immigration over the course of the 19th century.

Republicans keep wasting our money on their ideological boondoggles

Americans Pay a High Price for the GOP's Fiscal Irresponsibility

DAN BROOK for Common Dreams

The GOP is fiscally irresponsible in all sorts of ways.

Republicans are worse for the economy overall, worse for gross domestic product, worse for the budget deficit and national debt, worse for the trade deficit, worse for job growth, worse for wage increases, worse for inequality, worse for the stock market, and worse for much else.

No modern Republican president has ever reduced the deficit in any year with any budget. Every Republican president raised the federal budget deficit by overspending wildly on the military, the wealthy, and other wasteful things that don't constructively add to our economy or society.

The only three modern presidents to reduce the budget deficit have been Bill Clinton (who eliminated it and created a surplus), Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, all Democrats.

• About three-fourths of the entire national debt was accrued under Republican borrow-and-spend presidents.
• Republicans run higher trade deficits than Democrats.
• Unemployment is higher under Republican administrations
• The stock market does worse under Republican administrations, on average.
• Most recessions have begun under Republican administrations, as did the Great Depression.

None of the tax cuts for the rich and corporations that Republicans said would pay for themselves wound up paying for themselves. Instead, they made the wealthy wealthier. 

Kissinger dead at 100, whose legacy includes untold dead

Kissinger and realpolitik in US foreign policy

Jarrod Hayes, UMass Lowell

President Richard Nixon, left, speaks with national security
adviser Henry Kissinger at the White House in
September 1972. AP Photo

Henry Kissinger, who died on Nov. 29, 2023, at age 100, exercised more than 50 years of influence on American foreign policy.

I am a scholar of American foreign policy who has written on Kissinger’s service from 1969 to 1977 as national security adviser and secretary of state under the Nixon and Ford administrations. I have seen how his foreign policy views and actions played out for good and, mostly, for ill.

When Kissinger entered government as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, he espoused a narrow perspective of the national interest, known as “realpolitik,” primarily centered on maximizing the economic and military power of the United States.

This power- and transactionalist-oriented approach to foreign policy produced a series of destructive outcomes. They ranged from fomenting coups that put in place murderous dictatorships, as in Chile, to killing unarmed civilians, as in Cambodia, and alienating potential allies, as in India.

Trump's Similarities to Hitler Prove It Certainly Could 'Happen Here'

We must stop being bashful about calling Trump a fascist - the shoe fits

THOM HARTMANN Common Dreams

The Nazis in America are now “out.” This morning, former Republican Joe Scarborough explicitly compared Trump and his followers to Hitler and his Brownshirts on national television. They’re here.

At the same time, America’s richest man is retweeting antisemitism, rightwing influencers and radio/TV hosts are blaming “Jews and liberals” for the “invasion” of “illegals” to “replace white people,” and the entire GOP is embracing candidates and legislators who encourage hate and call for violence.

Are there parallels between the MAGA takeover of the GOP and the Nazi takeover of the German right in the 1930s?

It began with a national humiliation: defeat in war. For Germany, it was WWI; for America it was two wars George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lied us into as part of their 2004 “wartime president” re-election strategy (which had worked so well for Nixon with Vietnam in 1972 and Reagan with Grenada in 1984).

Hitler fought in WWI but later blamed Germany’s defeat on the nation being “stabbed in the back” by liberal Jews, their fellow travelers, and incompetent German military leadership.

Trump cheered on Bush’s invasion of Iraq, but later lied and claimed he’d opposed the war. Both blamed the nation’s humiliation on the incompetence or evil of their political enemies.

The economic crisis caused by America’s Republican Great Depression had gone worldwide and Hitler used the gutting of the German middle class (made worse by the punishing Treaty of Versailles) as a campaign issue, promising to restore economic good times.

Trump pointed to the damage forty years of neoliberalism had done to the American middle class and promised to restore blue-collar prosperity. Hitler promised he would “make Germany great again”; Trump campaigned on the slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

Both tried to overthrow their governments by violence and failed, Hitler in a Bavarian beer hall and Trump on January 6th. Both then turned to legal means to seize control of their nations.

Hitler’s scapegoats were Jews, gays, and liberals. “There are only two possibilities,” he told a Munich crowd in 1922. “Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.”

He promised “I will get rid of the ‘communist vermin’,” “I will take care of the ‘enemy within’,” “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood,” and “One people, one nation, one leader.”

Trump’s scapegoats were Blacks, Muslims, immigrants, and liberals.

Repeating the Year 2000 Disaster?

New “Third” Party choices might elect Donald Trump 

By Mitchell Zimmerman

By Mike Luckovich

Many Americans are unhappy about the likely 2024 choice being offered them for president – Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. But two third party alternatives surfaced recently: Jill Stein of the Green Party and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who appears to be seeking the “No Labels Party” nomination.

They join two other non-major-party candidates, anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and left-wing intellectual and activist Cornell West.

These candidates appear to offer voters a broad menu of political ideologies and beliefs from which to choose – from Kennedy’s contention that Americans are enslaved by vaccination record-keeping to Manchin’s claimed centrism to West’s plans for abolishing poverty and Stein’s condemnation of corporate-dominated politics.

One thing that is not on the third-party menu is an opportunity to vote for someone who could actually become president. There isn’t a ghost of a chance Jill Stein, Joe Manchin, Robert F. Kennedy or Cornell West will be elected.

Nonetheless, their campaigns could have a powerful impact: helping elect Donald Trump. The Green Party achieved an equivalent disaster before.

Guide to classified stolen documents

 

Hide and seek

Not our problem

 

Life as a battlefield

In some U.S. zip codes, young men face more risk of firearm death than those deployed in recent wars

Brown University

The risk of firearm death in the U.S. is on the rise: in 2020, firearms became the leading cause of death for children, adolescents and young adults. 

Yet the risk is far from even — young men in some U.S. zip codes face disproportionately higher risks of firearm-related injuries and deaths.

To better understand the magnitude of the gun violence crisis and put it in perspective, researchers at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania compared the risk of firearm-related death for young adult men living in the most violent areas in four major U.S. cities with the risks of combat death and injury faced by U.S. military personnel who served in Afghanistan and Iraq during active periods of war.

The results were mixed: The study, published in JAMA Network Open, found that young men from zip codes with the most firearm violence in Chicago and Philadelphia faced a notably higher risk of firearm-related death than U.S. military personnel deployed to wartime service in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the opposite was true in two other cities: The most violent areas in New York and Los Angeles were associated with much less risk for young men than those in the two wars.

In all zip codes studied, risks were overwhelmingly borne by young men from minority racial and ethnic groups, the study found.

Yeah, Republicans LOVE veterans

By Lalo Alcaraz

As inevitable as blood and taxes

A brief history of oil and warfare.

Peter Dykstra

By Chris Britt

Just like the looming disaster in our future, the unfolding tragedies in Ukraine are rooted in oil.

One of the less-remembered aspects of World War I is Britain’s effort to corner the then-nascent market in Middle Eastern oil.

“Oil explorer” William Reynolds drilled seven years of desert dry holes in what is now known as Iran before his first big strike in 1908. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was born, and the rush was on.

Turkey militarily challenged Britain’s oil control during and after the war. A young Territories Minister named Winston Churchill fended them off, including the first, primitive aerial use of chemical weapons: Barrels of phosgene gas hurled off a biplane.

The Turks had a major oil strike near Kirkuk, Iraq, in 1927. In Saudi Arabia 11 years later, an American-owned well came in—the first strike in what became known as the world’s largest oil field.

In World War II, a major part of Japan’s strategy was to cripple the U. S. Navy, then make a run to capture the oil fields in Indonesia and Malaysia. The Germans staged their ill-fated betrayal of the Soviet Union in part to seize the Caspian Sea oilfields. While many feel the Nazis lost the war with this failed move, it was a loss caused by an Army’s need for oil.

In 1953, fed up with his nation ’s fealty to oil, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized Big Oil’s Iranian assets. He fell victim to a coup the same year—even though it took nearly 70 years for the U.S. to admit what the rest of the world had long assumed: The CIA had staged the coup.

Let’s race through a few more oily events.

Same b.s., different year

By Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune

 

P.O.S. Donald Trump's "eulogy" on the death of Colin Powell

 

Editor's Note: Yes, Powell did sell the world on nonexistent weapons of mass destructive, an act he repented over the years. But nobody questions his honor, patriotism or dedication except General Bonespurs. And yes, I do "hope that happens to [him] someday" and soon.    -Will Collette

Estimated Cost of Post-9/11 US Wars Hits $8 Trillion With Nearly a Million People Dead

"What have we truly accomplished in 20 years of post 9/11 wars, and at what price?"

JON QUEALLY for Common Dreams

With the final U.S. soldiers leaving Afghanistan after nearly 20 years of occupation and war, a new analysis released September 1 shows the United States will ultimately spend upwards of $8 trillion and that nearly one million people have lost their lives so far in the so-called "global war on terror" that was launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

According to Brown University's Costs of War Project, which has been releasing reports on the financial and human costs of the post-9/11 wars at regular intervals since 2010, the total cost of the war and military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere over the last two decades have directly killed at least 897,000 to 929,000 people—an estimate the researchers say is conservative.

Afghanistan only the latest US war to be driven by deceit and delusion

We have made a habit of it 

Gordon Adams, American University School of International Service

On Aug. 16, 2021, thousands of Afghans trapped by the sudden Taliban
takeover rushed the Kabul airport tarmac. AP Photo/Shekib Rahmani

In Afghanistan, American hubris – the United States’ capacity for self-delusion and official lying – has struck once again, as it has repeatedly for the last 60 years.

This weakness-masquerading-as-strength has repeatedly led the country into failed foreign interventions. The pattern first became clear to me when I learned on Nov. 11, 1963, that the U.S. embassy and intelligence agencies had been directly involved in planning a coup to depose the president of South Vietnam and his brother, leading to their executions.

I was a Fulbright Fellow, starting a long career in national security policymaking and teaching, studying in Europe. On that day, I was in a bus on a tour of the battlefields of Ypres, Belgium, led by a French history professor.

As I watched the grave markers sweep by, I was reading a report in Le Monde exposing this U.S. effort to overthrow another government and I thought, “This is a bad idea; my country should not be doing this.” And the war, in which the U.S. was directly involved for 20 years, marched on.

The American people were told we had no hand in that coup. We did not know that was a lie until The New York Times and Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers in 1971. By then, 58,000 Americans and possibly as many as 3.5 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians had died – and the goal of preventing the unification of Vietnam had died as well.

For 15 years, the American foreign policy establishment struggled to overcome what it called the “Vietnam Syndrome” – the rational reluctance of the American people to invade and try to remake another country.

American hubris reemerged, this time as “the global war on terror.” Afghanistan is now the poster child for the sense that the U.S. can remake the world.

The Afghan War was lost the day George W. Bush ordered the US to invade

When Will We Stop Letting Our Presidents Lie America Into Wars?

By Thom Hartmann for the Independent Media Institute

Let’s never forget that what we are watching happen right now in Afghanistan is the final act of George W. Bush‘s 2004 reelection strategy. 

After 9/11 the Taliban offered to arrest Bin Laden, but Bush turned them down because he wanted to be a “wartime president” to have a “successful presidency.” 

The Washington Post headline weeks after 9/11 put it succinctly: “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer On Bin Laden.” With that decision not to arrest and try Bin Laden for his crime but instead to go to war George W. Bush set the US and Afghanistan on a direct path to today.

More recently, Trump and Pompeo gave the Taliban everything they wanted — power, legitimacy and the release of 5000 of their worst war criminals — over the strong objections of the Afghan government in 2019 so Trump could falsely claim, heading into the 2020 election, that he’d “negotiated peace” in Afghanistan when in fact he’d set up this week’s debacle.

Trump also released 5000 Taliban prisoners including
their leader who now runs Afghanistan

”The relationship I have with the Mullah is very good,” Trump proclaimed after ordering the mullah who yesterday named himself President freed from prison over the furious objection of Afghan’s government, who Trump had cut out of the negotiations.

Now Trump and the GOP are scrubbing the record of that betrayal of both America and Afghanistan and embrace of the Taliban from their websites, as noted here and here. 

And the UK is coming right out and saying that Trump’s “rushed” deal with the Taliban — without involvement of the Afghan government or the international community — set up this disaster. “The die was cast,” Defense Minister Ben Wallace told the BBC, “when the deal was done by Donald Trump, if you want my observation.”

Trump’s sabotage notwithstanding, President Biden, the State Department and the Pentagon should have anticipated this week’s debacle in Afghanistan. 

The fact that they didn’t speaks volumes about how four administrations, the Pentagon and our defense contractors covered up how poorly the Ashraf Ghani government was doing there. Just like they did with Vietnam. It’s on all of them.

And this isn’t the first time a president has lied us into a war.  

• Vietnam wasn’t the first time an American president and his buddies in the media lied us into a war when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara falsely claimed that an American warship had come under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin and LBJ went along with the lie.  
• Neither was President William McKinley lying us into the Spanish-American war in 1898 by falsely claiming that the USS Maine had been blown up in Havana harbor (it caught fire all by itself). 
• The first time we were lied into a major war by a president was probably the Mexican-American war of 1846 when President James Polk lied that we’d been invaded by Mexico. Even Abraham Lincoln, then a congressman from Illinois, called him out on that lie. 
• You could also argue that when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 leading to the Trail of Tears slaughter and forced relocation of the Cherokee under President Buchanan (among other atrocities) it was all based on a series of lies.

Bush’s lies that took us into Afghanistan and, a bit over a year later into Iraq, are particularly egregious, however, given his and Cheney’s apparent reasons for those lies. 

Just go away

Trump Is Going Overboard In His Final Days

He Should Just Disappear—Go Golfing and Leave Our Government Alone

By Terry H. Schwadron, DCReport Opinion Editor

Noxious a thought as it is, I was getting used to the idea that amid rapidly rising COVID-19 cases nationwide, Donald Trump just wanted to spend his last month playing golf and flailing about with unwarranted legal challenges to an election that he cannot overturn.

That he would be doing nothing about the biggest emergency facing the country has been insulting enough. 

It would seem from recent days that Trump’s only overt act was to take credit for private company scientists to be making great progress toward a vaccine against the coronavirus while ignoring 250,000 American deaths.

But come to find out, Trump has found a way to amuse himself with other actions to burnish his record, but that put the country more in peril. At the same time, it would put an incoming Joe Biden further in the hole.

He has been finding ways to stay busy outside of watching TV. Still, it’s anything but good for America.

Topping the list, of course, is refusing to allow any normal transition to proceed. That includes the necessary, non-partisan planning for the distribution of any emergent vaccine and refusing to help get a stimulus package through the lame-duck Congress.

With Trump having skipped five months’ worth of COVID-19 task force meetings, we should not be surprised now that public contagion hitting all the states is insufficient to hold his attention.

Why are veterans being hit so hard by COVID-19?

Part of it is age-related but much of it has to do with how we treat veterans
Jamie Rowen, University of Massachusetts Amherst

U.S. war veterans’ graves at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery,
San Diego, California. Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images 

As the nation takes a day to memorialize its military dead, those who are living are facing a deadly risk that has nothing to do with war or conflict: the coronavirus.

Different groups face different degrees of danger from the pandemic, from the elderly who are experiencing deadly outbreaks in nursing homes to communities of color with higher infection and death rates. 

Veterans are among the most hard-hit, with heightened health and economic threats from the pandemic. These veterans face homelessness, lack of health care, delays in receiving financial support and even death.

I have spent the past four years studying veterans with substance use and mental health disorders who are in the criminal justice system. This work revealed gaps in health care and financial support for veterans, even though they have the best publicly funded benefits in the country.

Here are eight ways the pandemic threatens veterans:

VIDEO: Democrats get the clean up jobs

To watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcF5o-qkphg&feature=emb_title

Trump Says U.S. Is Ready for War.

Not All His Troops Are So Sure.
By T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, and Robert Faturechi for ProPublica

Between the killing of Iran’s most important general and Iran’s missiles hurtling toward American troops in Iraq, President Donald Trump took time to discuss America’s military prowess.

“The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment,” he tweeted on Jan. 5. “If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way.”

Besides being wrong (the military has not spent that much), he repeated a mistake that military leaders have made for years: emphasizing weapons over the fitness of the men and women charged with firing them.

Over the past 18 months, ProPublica has dug into military accidents in recent years that, all told, call into question just how prepared the American military is to fight America’s battles.

If forced to fight in the Persian Gulf or the Korean Peninsula, the Navy and Marine Corps are likely to play crucial roles in holding strategic command of the sea and defending against ballistic missiles.

Those branches, though, do not need billions of dollars of new weapons, our examination revealed. They need to focus on the basics: its service members, their training and their equipment.

The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ watchdog, has been sounding the alarm for years, to little effect. In 2016, the GAO found that years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan had taken their toll: “The military services have reported persistently low readiness levels.”

In 2018, the agency focused on the Navy and Marine Corps. All seven types of aircraft it tracked, from cargo planes to fighters like the F/A-18D, had repeatedly missed goals for being prepared for missions. “Aviation readiness will take many years to recover,” the GAO said.

In a report last month, the GAO found that only about 25% of Navy shipyard repairs were completed on time. “The Navy continues to face persistent and substantial maintenance delays that affect the majority of its maintenance efforts and hinder its attempts to restore readiness,” it said.