Author Archives: LouzConstant

Donald Trump Trots Out Tale Of Muslims, Pig Blood, and Bullets

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump ended his final campaign rally of the South Carolina primary Friday night with a story about a four-star general, Muslim insurgents, and bullets dunked in pig blood. Forty minutes into his address at a not-quite-full convention center in North Charleston, after mocking Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s lack of enthusiasm for waterboarding, the Republican presidential frontrunner told the crowd he wanted to share an anecdote he’d heard about General John Pershing.

“General Pershing was a rough guy,” Trump said. He explained that during the early 1900s, the general was battling Muslim insurgents in the US-controlled Philippines, he decided to make a point:

He caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage…and he took the 50 terrorists and he took 50 men and dipped 50 bullets in pig’s blood. You heard about that? He took 50 bullets and dipped them in pig’s blood which is considered haram. And he has his men load up their rifles and he lined up the 50 people and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said, you go back to your people and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem.

“We’ve got to start getting tough and we’ve got to start being vigilant and we’ve got to start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks,” he concluded.

Snopes, the online mythbuster, classifies the Pershing tale—which is popular on the right—as a “legend.” “We haven’t eliminated the possibility… but so far all we’ve turned up are several different accounts with nothing that documents Pershing’s involvement,” it explains.

But a lack of evidence has never stopped Trump, especially when it comes to the anti-Islam invective that has helped keep him atop the polls in South Carolina. His proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States is hugely popular among Republicans; a recent survey of his supporters found that just 44 percent believed Islam should even be legal. So with his candidacy on the line, he’s sticking with what got him to this point.

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Donald Trump Trots Out Tale Of Muslims, Pig Blood, and Bullets

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Ben Carson Just Dropped This Pretty Insane Immigration Policy on the Nation

Mother Jones

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In a Wednesday press conference at Liberty University, a day after the GOP presidential candidates’ most recent debate, co-frontrunner Ben Carson aired his views on one of the race’s most contested topics: immigration. The former surgeon echoed Donald Trump on the magical powers of a heavily policed border fence and pushed back against his rival on the desirability of purging 11 million undocumented people, expressing concern for the plight of “farmers with multi-thousand acre farms” and hotel owners, who, he fretted, would have trouble finding workers to harvest crops and clean rooms.

Then he dropped a whopper. The answer to stemming the (alleged) tide of undocumented workers coming from the south is easy, he suggested: US companies simply need to set up shop in Central and South America and teach them how to farm. His model, he said, is Cameroon, where US agribusiness firms are “helping to develop millions of acres and incredibly fertile land, growing record crops, and getting big profits,” which, he added, “is great for them; I like business.”

These companies are doing well by doing good, he argued, “building the infrastructure of a nation, creating jobs there, and teaching them the ag business so they carry on themselves, while at the same time creating friends for the United States.” And if US firms repeat this feat south of the US border, “people won’t feel the necessity to come here.”

Whoa. First, Cameroon makes an odd model for foreign-led agriculture development. The nation has seen overall food production rise and malnutrition rates drop, but that’s the work of domestic smallholder farmers growing for the local market, not multinationals. Foreign firms have played a large role in converting forest into large palm oil plantations, but those efforts have generated at least as much controversy as “friends for the United States.” The Belgian-owned company Socapalm is locked in a “bitter land rights struggle” with villagers over expansion plans, The Guardian reports. And earlier this month, the government sentenced Cameroon environmental activist and NGO leader Nasako Besing to three years in prison for his role in opposing a hotly contested palm expansion/deforestation project by US firm Herakles Farm.

Then there’s the vexed history of US interventions in Mexican agriculture. The Green Revolution—the effort, funded by US foundations, to bring industrial-style agriculture to the global south—started in Mexico in the 1940s. As the historian Nick Cullather shows in his fantastic 2010 book The Hungry World (which I reviewed here), the Green Revolution did transform agriculture in Mexico’s north. The result: “narrowing of domestic agriculture’s genetic base, supplanting indigenous, sustainable practices; displacing small and communal farming with commercial agribusiness; and pushing millions of peasants into urban slums or across the border.”

Thus Mexico’s Green Revolution experience triggered what 1950s US policymakers would call the “wetback problem”—1.5 million migrants crossing the border each year in search of gainful work, Cullather shows. And that led directly to President Eisenhower’s infamous Operation Wetback, the very round-’em-up-and-purge-them scheme that Carson’s opponent Trump repeatedly trumpeted (though not by name) in Tuesday’s debate.

Of course, the last big wave of Mexican migration was also directly linked to US agribusiness. Implemented in 1994, NAFTA removed trade barriers and inspired Mexican policymakers to withdraw support for Mexican farmers. The result was a flood of subsidized US corn going south, a plunge in corn prices, and a tide of displaced Mexican smallholders heading north, as the Mexican analyst Ana de Ita and others have shown. US firms like Archer Daniels Midland profited handsomely.

In more recent years, though, immigration from Mexico has slowed dramatically, brought down by a variety of factors, from better corn prices in Mexico to less pull from the sluggish US economy. There’s strong evidence that net Mexico-to-US migration (the number of new arrivals minus the number who leave) is at or near zero. You won’t hear Carson or Trump talk about that, or the fact that current undocumented immigrants pay billions in annual taxes, both federal and state/local, in exchange for low-wage labor on farms, in restaurants, etc. On the immigration issue, Carson and his main rival to the GOP presidential throne are spewing noxious fumes about nothing in particular.

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Ben Carson Just Dropped This Pretty Insane Immigration Policy on the Nation

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