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We immigrants know the America-bashers are ridiculously wrong.
There’s irony in the fact that the party which considers itself “pro-immigrant” is also the one that wants to destroy our country’s rich and complicated heritage. If Democrats believe immigrants come to America to be anything but American, they are kidding themselves. My family and millions of others came here longing to be free, to say what we want, to worship how we want and to raise American children who will know nothing but freedom.
ReplyDeleteAOC is not my cup of tea, but she does not hate the USA, and does not represent a "fringe" herself, but at least the majority who voted her into office. She's originally a Bronx girl of Puerto Rican and Jewish ancestry, who loves her country, a smart cookie from Yorktown High.
If this errant article misses the mark on AOC, then it surely misses the mark on its unmentioned others -- some "fringe" the author has imagined, along with the copy editor or whoever pluralize the word to be "bashers" in the title.
The article is written by one immigrant, certainly not all immigrants, and apparently not even a small group of them. But let's give Markowicz the latter, that she was inspired to write the article after meeting with a fringe group of like-minded immigrants, who were, in plural, bashing AOC one day.
The basher article is not worthy as an anniversary tribute to being naturalized as an American citizen.
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AOC said what she said. I suspect my Polish immigrant grandfather would agree with the article
ReplyDeleteYou sent me looking for an AOC garbage quote, because, "garbage" in quotation marks, is the only quote in the article. Do you have the full sentence and context? I cannot find it. In context of this really poor article, Markowicz has AOC talking about "inequality and other social ills". In such context, I'd have to say that this is our garbage, and needs to be thrown out or fed to the pigs. Markowicz may have inadvertantly made AOC's point.
ReplyDeleteOcasio-Cortez attacked capitalism and free enterprise, and told her supporters that America has “unlimited resources” that could give everyone what they wanted… but secret billionaires were hoarding it all for themselves. “I think all of these things sound radical compared to where we are,” she continued. “But where [Americans] are is not a good thing. And this idea of like, ten percent better than garbage, it shouldn’t be what we settle for.”
ReplyDeleteThanks. I found the video: AOC at SXSW.
ReplyDeleteThe question AOC was asked had to do with the weakening of the labor movement. She had also talked about the government pulling services away. Her response to the labor question was that US wealth has gone up, but wage rates all the while have become flat. Furthermore, according to AOC, this and the government's redlining leave many workers to live "ten percent better than garbage."
She's talking about how workers should not be treated like garbage. It's a sort of MAGA position, that we have slowly declined as far as how our workers live, and we need to get some of that greatness back, or at least get that much greatness back, if not more. Thus, Americans are not garbage to AOC at all, and should never be treated like they are, or as if near-garbage is all they deserve.
As an aside, to go decades back with my own perspective on this, something more moderate, the UAW used to be a strong union, getting workers their pieces of the pie. How this was balanced (back in the day, as you surely recall, Frank), is that often Congress would need to get involved to settle strikes, to get the factories back up and running again. Then, suddenly, whoa!, the Japanese were allowed to build cars in this country, not honoring any of the UAW/Big three/US Congress contracts.
This not only pushed the wages of auto workers close to garbage, or started that ball rolling, making it okay to cheap out on the workers, but weakened Chrysler, Ford, & GM as well, making them compete with foreign companies with their hands tied into paying higher wages, and certainly pummeled Detroit and surrounding communities. Detroit workers got treat just like garbage. Looking at how the area got decimated into a near ghost town or would we say ten percent above ghost town?
We know that when we get Big Government, Big Labor, and Big Business, we get Big Corruption across the board as well. What happens when Big Government and Big Business squeezes out Big Labor? It only makes the other two more corrupt, more power-grabbing, more resource-grabbing, money-grabbing. The effect on the workers is to be treated "ten percent better than garbage, it shouldn’t be what we settle for.”