Know Your Class War: Immigration and The People Problem

 

I made what I thought was a kind of anodyne comment on Twitter about how immigrants were demonized for stealing jobs when that wasn't what they did at all: if they were hired for a job, showed up and did the job and got paid for it, they weren't stealing a job, they were working a job. To me, this was just sense. I've said it before right here. Anyway, however I said it, it was assumed I did not know that employers intentionally employed undocumented workers because they lived in fear of being deported and therefore were exploited and damn, I know.   It's hard not to be aware of it. 

The point I was trying to make is, the immigrants aren't bodying people out of kitchens and off assembly-lines and taking over retail warehouses and starting to collect paychecks by doing nothing at all. They aren't stealing jobs--employers are giving them jobs. Are they legally doing so? Yeah, if they are not checking if they have a right to work, that's illegal. If they are paying them under the table, they know that's wrong. So why are we going to get spun up over undocumented workers trying to feed, clothe, and house themselves over whether employers are complying with the law? 

Immigrants aren't stealing jobs. They might have an impact on local wages and employer choices, but that isn't on them. They are taking available jobs because they have to eat.  And if you wanted better local wages and better watchdogs over labor issues--you could most certainly vote for pro-labor political candidates and push for labor issues wherever and whenever you could. You should support living wage laws and support strengthening regulatory leverage over abusive employers. Immigrants are just trying to live. 

The second thing I want to address isn't the "stealing people's jobs" thing, but the dehumanizing thing. I might not be a labor expert any more than I am a lawyer or a historian, but when people start talking about other people as a "problem" or as a "question" and start talking about transporting them to tent cities, or camps, or ghettos, or reservations, or just thinking "relocating" is the answer to how to ever deal with people--you aren't thinking about people as people, but as some kind of unwanted furniture. That shit is fascism. 

I get that people feel entitled to their resentment over the idea that marginalized people occasionally appear to make out from certain insufficiencies in our capitalist moral landscape. But I am fucking harrowed by the penalties human beings face for trying to come here and build a better world for themselves by trusting monsters. How desperate does one have to be to be positioned to sit and be fried alive? 

People are not the problem. Our willingness to not see people as people, but as units of labor are. Or as political pawns and props, or as useful targets of resentment-fueled propaganda. Immigration, like resolving the homeless crisis or any other thing where people are deprived of resources, can be an unlocked asset by a wealthy country figuring out where the resources are. We are mean and we suck as people because we don't focus on doing stuff like that. We don't see people as people and useful in their own right and would throw them away rather than invest in their having the lives they should that let them maximize the good they can give in return. 

Anyway, that's my $.02. 

 

The Eternal Question: Lying or Stupid?

 

GOP Rep. McClain falsely claimed that Trump caught Osama bin Laden. The Al Qaeda leader was killed during the first Obama administration, when Trump was still hosting a game show. https://t.co/1urcAsB7S7

— Insider News (@InsiderNews) April 3, 2022

See, I want to believe that every adult American person alive in 2011 remembers that President Obama announced that there was a successful mission to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden. It would be really difficult for me to believe that Rep. McClain is anaware of this. It could be that she was thinking about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who she mentions an entire breath later, but whose name she couldn't come up with right away--but it's still inexcusable. It's also possible she entirely meant "inflation", not "unemployment", when she declared that unemployment was at a 40 year high (when it is actually at a 50 year low). 

But it's the old eternal question isn't it? Lying or Stupid. If it's a lie, it's terrible, and if it's sheer stupidity--yes that is also news. Why would we be ok with elected figures who are just dumb as hell about what are basically current events? And yet it seems like people accept a certain degree of lying from Republicans and are almost embarrassed to call them out as stupid.

I've mentioned just recently the problem we have with taking polls for how people feel about facts (they don't always agree with'em!) when some people are just contrarian or hopelessly misinformed. What does a poll mean when it shows that a high number of people are out of touch with actual facts? Like, for example--who won the 2020 presidential election? A good portion of the media doesn't see the problem of, say, people not understanding that Biden has been responsible for a jobs boom as a media problem, but as a "Democrats in disarray" problem.

Anyway--if Democrats are responsible for cleaning up the information mess, it's important to challenge the outright lying, and not making excuses for the stupidity of dissembling Republicans. I don't assume even GOP "mistakes" are honest. So rip them on the apparent lying, and make them look stupid back-pedaling. 

TWGB: Fraud and Sedition

 

Photograph of *Roger Stone* on *JANUARY 6th* with Joshua James, who just pled to SEDITIOUS CONSPIRACY and obstructing an official proceeding and is facing 7-9 years in prison as part of a full cooperation agreement.

This is going to get quite interesting. pic.twitter.com/5LpeHDLTVY

— Spiro Agnew’s Ghost 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦 (@SpiroAgnewGhost) March 3, 2022

That's right: a member of the Oath Keepers just copped to seditious conspiracy, and allowed that the intent of the riot that day was to obstruct the official proceedings of Congress in certifying the 2020 election. The information about the Oath Keepers' part in this conspiracy suggests a lot of planned armed violence.  

But in addition to that bit of news, the January 6th committee has determined that John Eastman hasn't any reason to claim attorney/client privilege because he conspired with Trump to defraud the US people by fabricating a fraud to steal an election. Trump was advised he lost, Eastman also understood what the vote meant, but maybe there was a legal strategy to overcome the facts? 

I don't hate lawyers, but this sort of shit is why lawyers get a bad rap, you know. Trying to steal whole elections, Circumventing democracy. Basically undermining the entire jist of our American experiment because some rich dude said it was okay to get funky with your bad theoretical self and imagine facts weren't so. 

The election-theft lie was always specious and kind of stupid: Italian satellites, German servers, Chinese thermostats and Venezuelan voting machines is just conspiracy theory Mad-Libs: references to odd, random fictional data points to have conspiracy theorists play connect-the dots with shit that isn't even part of the same puzzle book, let alone the same page, as the problem of why Trump didn't win. 

Labor Day: Is It A Crime?

 

The $7.25 minimum wage can’t pay all the bills in any state https://t.co/wTk5JHdYNQ

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) September 7, 2021

We talk sometimes about "working for a living", so I just want to interject that working doesn't always provide a living. It provides the barebones of existing, maybe feeding oneself and ones' kids, inadequately, going into soul-disrupting debt at times, relying on various kinds of assistance at others.

Labor Day, Essentially

So, as a person who was determined to be essential back in March and worked with only three unpaid days off in more or less same as normal straits and the spouse of a person who was also made essential as a grocery worker who worked for a short while far more than his usual allotment, and the relative of someone who as a nurse contracted COVID on the job and thankfully, all were young and healthy! Let's just say this Labor Day, my thoughts are with all workers who had to keep up with the COVID times, whether you got shafted entirely, had your hours reduced, or found yourself working in dangerous conditions and had to function above and beyond.

There's a kind of bias to the idea of "essential worker"--someone's paying us for our labor, so it must be worth something, whatever it is. And we are worth more than what we do for a living, even if we need work to keep our very lives together, because our jobs constitute something less than the entirety of what we are capable of.  And for those who lost jobs due to the public situation of COVID-19 spread--whose industries were harmed because of the necessary public-facing nature of those industries, nothing about the value of the work you do has changed, only the demand.

Things economically have gone awry in the US in part because of a failure to appreciate that the citizen worker is both the source and consumer of value. I'm not saying I know exactly what to do about that, but I resent when elected leaders talk about jobs in glee about gaining back half of what was precipitously lost in a short while over bad public management of a pandemic there should have been planning for, and with no acknowledgement of the lives that have been lost due to poor planning and privileging the economy over those lives.

They also need to be judged based on the products of their labors. Some may need to be made redundant.

Fouling Up Social Security

Today, Donald Trump stated that if re-elected, he'll undermine the entire financial footing of Social Security.

Our seniors and millions of Americans with disabilities are under enough stress without their hard-earned Social Security benefits in doubt. https://t.co/glUDQlcbEO

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 9, 2020

Of all the ding-bat things Trump could decide to try during a time of massive job losses, of course he'd have to throw in one that makes no real sense: a payroll tax deferral when the problem is people aren't on any damn payroll. (And the surprise-level about that should be nil--he lies about things, but he also does not understand shit about crap.) It's a fake gave-away to employers--except it will have to be paid back oh, unless Trump is re-elected when he will make it "permanent". So Social Security and Medicare will just not be funded, and that means he's basically fucking them as hard as he's fucking the post office right now.

Older people who were thinking of voting for Trump--first he wants you to die of coronavirus because he thinks he wants better economics numbers and to his clueless brain, that means business as usual, but he doesn't understand the economy is dependent on the virus actually being under control because fear of death is a pretty big factor in determining consumer habits. (I certainly wouldn't go to a restaurant if I thought my entree came with a side-order of COVID, for example.) Then he threatens your benefits, because, get this, your benefits are funded by people contributing to programs right now. And then he's also going to mess with, not just your voting by mail so you can do it safely, but things like your getting medicines by mail, or paying your bills by mail on time (incurring late fees), and other little things you might want to sit and think about.

And it's because he was too dumb to get his ass sorted about the pandemic back in February. Oh, and because he's lousy at being president, but is shit-scared that not being president will wind his ass up in prison, and there are reasons it should.

Also, in Trump's continuing plan to make executive orders that he most likely can't do and hasn't thought out and are campaign stunts and not actual things that will materialize are pretending he can stop evictions (by having different agencies look into it) and reducing the previous federal UI amount and making it dependent on what states are paying. And he's taking the money out of FEMA disaster relief and damn. That could be really bad.

Like, how is this all supposed to help? He could provide more immediate aid by directing Meadows to not fuck around and cooperate with Pelosi who already has something not-useless planned. It would show he has confidence he could sell that to the American people outside of his little club.

It just looks an awful lot like he's decided he'd rather wreck a lot of things than be remotely constructive, at a time when his being useful, or even vaguely like a leader in fact instead of play-acting as one, would be useful not just to see the country through an actual crisis, but maybe even do some magic on his poll numbers so he wouldn't have to fuck about with voter suppression. But he isn't the man for that. And it's starting to look pretty clear who should be doing the job Trump can't.

What Year is This, Again? Suburban Housewives?

Trump tweeted to an interesting demographic--"Suburban Housewives of America" to let them know that Joe Biden would kill their American dream of a little single home with a white picket fence and 2.5 children playing ball in the yard with their dog, Rusty, by letting the poor urban folks move into their neighborhoods and go to their schools and I don't even know what next!

Anyway, he linked to an article by Betsy McCaughey, and regardless of what year it is, she's the worst. But she does get to the nut of what all this is about, all right:

The president won the suburbs in 2016, but polls show Trump trailing in the suburbs largely because of opposition from women. They need to focus on what’s at stake for their families.

Sure, he might botch a pandemic response, kill millions of jobs, sue to end the ACA which would separate millions of American from health care (which we know McCaughey has concerned herself with like a busy little bee in her time, yes?), and has sent camo-wearing paramilitary forces to, for now, Portland to teargas moms, but he won't ever, ever....have apartment buildings put somewhere near your vague geographic vicinity, which is what I am sure this is actually all about.

Because the American Dream, is why.

A Pleasant Shock

News Analysis: LGBT rights leaders were stunned Monday when 2 conservative justices sided with the majority in one of the most sweeping gay rights decisions by the Supreme Court so far, write Adam Nagourney and Jeremy Peters https://t.co/l8xUm7XLKr

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 15, 2020

I think there's something very bittersweet in the shock some felt that the SCOTUS decision affirmed that LGBT people should be treated equally under the law with respect to employment. It is the decision that should have been expected, in that the law speaks against discrimination on the basis of sex and how else would one define the nature of being gay or transgender without the concept of sex? But it's also unsurprising to see the dissent try to turn on quaint and outmoded definitions and social conservatives groan that they have been betrayed.

(As an church/state separation enthusiast, I'm heartened by the idea that there isn't much room for a religious exemption, in that businesses hire people to do a job, not live an identity. While it might make sense, for example, that a priest be Catholic to do a Catholic mass, or that a mohel be Jewish, I don't see what business it is of, say, a craft store, what their cashiers identify as or who they love or marry so long as they don't short their till and are good with customers.)

But in this day and age, I'll let the shock go and enjoy that there is some pleasant news for a change. I also wonder if this decision forms the basis for a challenge to the Trump Administration's decision this past Friday to permit healthcare discrimination for trans people. (Although I think it more likely it will just be reversed by the next administration before we find out.)

Don't call it a Comeback

The May jobs report had "misclassification error" that made the unemployment rate look lower than it is. Here’s what happened. https://t.co/oFrdlw99el

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 6, 2020

When the U.S. government’s official jobs report for May came out on Friday, it included a note at the bottom saying there had been a major “error” indicating that the unemployment rate likely should be higher than the widely reported 13.3 percent rate.

The special note said that if this “misclassification error” had not occurred, the “overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported,” meaning the unemployment rate would be about 16.3 percent for May.

Look, I like happy news and am by no means rooting for the economy to do poorly--that stands for real people's jobs and income! On the other hand, when the jobs numbers had tanked so severely, we have to be realistic and not applaud too soon. The economic devastation was caused by the pandemic event, and we're not totally out of it. Also, when jobs do come back, our persistent inequalities will still be here.

Capitalism is Sick 2

U.S. stock futures rise after payrolls report shows record number of Americans lost their jobs in April https://t.co/SU8W8AzUhQ pic.twitter.com/BlBKToFrfI

— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) May 8, 2020

The stock market is not the economy, lather, rinse, repeat. The market has optimism based on plans to reopen the economy, but there is no guarantee that business will take off because many people are a) broke and/or b) concerned for their health going back to work in a potentially unsafe environment. There won't be a "normal" anytime soon.

Merry Christmas. Mister Trump!

In the vein of Twitter diatribe that I think of as "Trump Going 'Boom!'" the Peerless Feeder had to engage with social media to soak up likes and retweets and outrage and whatnot--again. So, in his recent obsession, the FBI is chockfull of wacky liberals out to get him who for entirely partisan reasons tanked the email investigation against Hillary Clinton and ginned up the Russian hacking investigation that his campaign/administration got swept up in (because of all the Russian contacts people in the Trump orbit actually had and the ridiculous mendacity they chose to use to half-assedly hide it)-which now makes career professionals like FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and FBI Counsel Jim Baker his targets for cranky Twitterage.

It's adorable, really--he once pretended he fired James Comey because he was too hard on Clinton (is she supposed to be the phony--or was the investigation?) and now Trump is pissed that the investigation didn't go far enough? The little joys of an extended interobang ( ?!!!) to imply that FBI Deputy Director McCabe might not outlast the period of time he indicated before he retired (when he would be eligible for pension). Does this sound like Trump is going to fire a man before he is eligible for pension--out of sheer spite? To me, a little!  And Trump also says he is learning that James Baker is being reassigned from Fox News. Because he isn't in the loop on personnel and learns everything he needs to know from "the shows" despite never watching tv?  Ah!

Also, he now thinks official reporting of the unemployment rate is spot on despite calling it fake news during his campaign, and doesn't realize that the news covers the stock market on the daily. And he conveniently forgets the robocall and the rally he himself personally held for Roy Moore, the pedophile, whose name will now be associated with Trump's desperate support because his hand in Congress is weak! "Good Republican candidates will win BIG!" for a value of "Good" that means they win and a value of "BIG" that means he will fake it later.

I don't know why he had to explode on Twitter just now, when we are finally able to say "Merry Christmas" and mention "Jesus Christ" and all that. Maybe he's worried about some spirits regarding former associates, or the past, or maybe his present, or maybe he's thinking about Christmases yet to come.

Anyways--Merry Christmas, Mr. Scrooge  Trump!

It is to Laugh!

President Trump on the job report, per Sean Spicer: “They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.” https://t.co/8HYuY2A7tJ

— CNN (@CNN) March 10, 2017

There is nothing funnier than the idea that we have a president who shamelessly lied to undermine the Bureau of Labor Statistics during his campaign constantly, but now feels these numbers are perfectly great.

HAAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHHA!

(See, the joke is that Trump was always lying, and the suckers believed him! Right? Right? Yeah, it isn't actually funny. I don't know why the press is laughing along.)

Trump Gets The Best People--Believe Me!

Now that Donald Trump is on his third campaign manager, and some extraordinarily choice allegations have come out regarding his campaign CEO Steve Bannon (is campaign CEO even a thing?) isn't it time we looked into Trump's claim he will get the very best people to do...I dunno, politics stuff...for his presidency, if that was the sort of thing we were going to do?

It's doubtful whether the best people is what he's actually looking for.  I mean, it's seriously questionable.  Let's face it--who decides to have Michele Bachmann consult for foreign policy and KS Gov. Sam Brownback consult for economics?  Who decides that you have a Christie associate who was madly disavowed by the NJ Gov. post-Bridgegate, Bill Stepien, appointed to anything, as if that wasn't going to become the story?

All of these choices are kind of questionable. Does Trump get the best people, or, as with Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, does he just accept a package deal from one of his main contributors?

Does he know what he is even doing here, or is he so dopey he just does whatever the people he stupidly trusts tells him to do?


What I'm getting at is, does it look like Trump even runs his campaign based on who all is in it? Does it look like he's even involved? Like when he reads from a Teleprompter and he confronts the words like they are fresh and brand new to him?  Do you want someone who does not know how to pick the best people--and picks the most nonsense folks to exist ever as his advisors? Because that is apparently the status of Team Trump right now--nonsense people.

Know Your Class War: Freddie Gray's Neighborhood

(This picture, from this post, sums up the question: "What is important in our lives?" If there are cities with "ghost blocks" like this, where every house is boarded up, what does that say to the people who live in close proximity to such blocks? What do those residents feel walking down such a weirdly dead area? What would their conception of the future look like?)

At Crooks & Liars, Karoli has written a most excellent piece regarding Freddie Gray's shadowed start in life, from premature birth to childhood development poisoned by lead, and surrounded by poverty. We know that exposure to toxic chemicals and substances like lead are a damaging part of poverty, robbing people of IQ points and years of life expectancy. The exposure to lead, specifically, has been associated with criminal incidents, with might help explain, if not totally excuse, Gray's rap sheet.

Labor Day: America, the Overworked

The face of this Labor Day, for me, is Maria Fernandes, who died at the age of 32, in her car, overcome by fumes from her running car and spilled gasoline inside of that car, while she was trying to catch some sleep between the shifts of her four low-paying jobs. Four. Part-time. Low-paying. Jobs. How in the hell can four jobs be so crappy in pay and hours, that one can or even has to fit all four into their schedule?

Well, the Star Ledger story does explain:

New Jersey has tens of thousands of people working multiple jobs, said Carl Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.

"These are are folks who would like to work full-time but they can't find the jobs," Van Horn said. "They wind up in these circumstances in which they are exhausted. More commonly it creates just an enormous amount of stress," he said.

Many people have been forced to work two or three part time jobs after losing a full-time position in the recession of 2008.

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 7.5 million people nationwide are working more than one job, Van Horn said, and those jobs still leave people with less income than their full-time work.

But this isn't just a New Jersey story. Millenials are liable to start out in low-paying service jobs and work at many jobs over a lifetime, and our economy has, since my generation (X) wandered out into the McJob landscape, mainly offered increasingly crappy pay, depressingly shabbier benefits, and it even looks like retirement has become a thing of the past for many older Americans--a past they didn't get to know.

An Extension of Unemployment Benefits Still Uncertain

I'm reminded by looking back on last year's posts that this is by no means a great time of year for jobless Americans who are facing the end of their unemployment benefits (the deal struck last year this time included an extension). It appears that the future for an extension of benefits is still in the air, with Republicans against it.

I'm not sure how the idea that being unemployed was a cushy set-up entered into the rationale, but it's no such thing. No one is collecting money hand over fist and living it up. Ending unemployment benefits does nothing to create jobs, and since those benefits go right back out into the economy, ending them has an anti-stimulative effect. Not going ahead with an extension may act as a disincentive to continuing to look for work. I also wonder when I hear people talk about a "culture of dependency" whether they've stopped to consider that people are actually dependent by mere biology on food, water, heat and shelter.

Know Your Class War: Four out of Five Americans

Four out of five Americans will experience some kind of financial difficulty, from unemployment to relying on government assistance, at some time in their lives. That seems like an amazingly general experience--but because for many people, this is a transient experience (a visit to "broke", as opposed to a prolonged stay), I think people are able to convince themselves that they haven't, you know, been poor. Not like, you know. Them. The Poor. As in: "The poor are always with us"?

Truth be told, it's more like: "The possibility of being poor is always with you, and me." At the ThinkProgress link, blogger Bryce Covert breaks down some of the ways the US is failing to address poverty--part of a painful trend of so-called "fiscal conservatism" has basically shaken down to an almost personal viciousness towards people experiencing need. But that is four out of five of us. This isn't a country composed of 80% lazy bastards. This is a country of increasing income inequality, where people can work (longer and harder than some of the 1%-ers)  and are still too poor to afford rent, to keep the lights on, or even feed themselves.

That's why when I hear that smug fake-Christian sentiment springing from mouths like Michele Bachmann's, for example, saying "If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat", I wonder if that person saying it ever considered whether "will not work" ever meant "will not work for a wage too low to feed themselves or their family". (But since she, like several other Republicans, has espoused the idea that there should be no minimum wage--no. Leaving possibility that some will work, and neither shall they eat, either.) And when I see that people who endorse such specifically insulting policies like drug-testing people who go on assistance get some support from people who are in that four out of five group--it strikes me that part of the on-going class war isn't just the elites shafting the broke. It's a war between people who know what limited resources are and have been conditioned to battle each other over the scraps. Which is why think tanks and major newspaper opinion pages are full of people who can, without flinching, suggest that, say, a political party might hold up a vote on unemployment benefits to gain a concession on taking money out of pensioners' pockets.

On some level, for the well-sinecured hams that dribble internecine class war gravy wherever they opine, suggesting that providing food programs for poor kids and giving some families health care too, only takes tax money! Away! From the job-creators! Must really be done, just a little bit, for sport. To raise up our fears that next time, maybe that "rich government entitlement" someone else gets, will take something from us.

It's a bum fight. Where 80% of us are bums. (And the honest truth is, no, it shouldn't be the government who provides for all our asses at all, at all. Why has this conversation so often excluded the very folks that should be, allegedly, creating the jobs and paying the people who fill them enough to live?)  We should be clever enough to realize it, proud enough to resent it, pissed enough to sort out how to end it.

Sharron Angle: Unemployment "doesn't benefit anyone."

Wow. Maybe more of what she said will put that into some context for us:

"The problem here, the problem here is what always happens with progressives. They want to put band-aids on problems rather than put real solutions to problems," said Angle. "People don't want to be unemployed. They want to have real, full-time and permanent jobs with a future. That's what they want.

"And we need to create that climate in Washington, D.C., that encourages businesses to create those full-time, permanent jobs with a future, and all [Rep.] Shelley Berkeley and Harry Reid want to do is put a band-aid on this by extending unemployment, which really doesn't benefit anyone. What happens is, of course, that your skills stagnate. You become demoralized yourself, you know, feeling that I can't ever get a job. And these are not the solutions to the problem. We have real solutions, but they won't look at the real solutions."

Okay. Now we can see where she's coming from: she's mean and wrong.

Being unemployed is demoralizing. Not finding a job sucks. Being turned down for jobs because of your age or your current skill-level suck very, very much. Yes, it would be ever so much better for people to get jobs--

Where are they coming from? The unemployed have no paycheck, and the clock is ticking.

You know what else is demoralizing? After you've cancelled the cable, pulled money out of your savings for some bills, started missing payments on others which you never wanted to do--getting that first thing switched off. The phone. The electric.

Getting a vehicle repo'd.

Not making rent and having that conversation with a landlord who doesn't want to hear it.

Swallowing your pride and hitting up a relative for a little loan.

Moving in with the folks. Or moving in with the kids. Moving into with the folks, with your kids in tow.

Explaining to your kid why they aren't really getting anything for their birthday this time around.

The look in someone's eyes when they aren't hiring you.

The look in your spouse's eyes when they are going over the checkbook again.

The look in your kids' eyes. All. the. time.

Maybe Sharron Angle can't comprehend that extending benefits to keep people from going over a cliff or walking off a ledge, and finding long-term solutions to the jobless problemm aren't mutually exclusive. Doing one isn't preventing the other from taking place. Even so, she has to understand that letting these people down fails the system, does more harm than good, hurts families, and is just plain rotten, right?

Or, you know, she could be a psychopath.