Six Things I Think: A Bipartisan Propaganda Frontier

Editor’s note: our Six Things I Think feature is a type of post I use when I want to cover a lot of ground about a multi-faceted topic very quickly. Although you don’t strictly have to click on every citation link in this essay, you might want to at least skim the (eight) featured articles as they inform the discussion attached to them.

This piece is also part of the “Leftist Theory” collection here on ninaillingworth.com.

 

Nested Propaganda About Imaginary Lines

Recently on my Media Madness blog, I published a granular examination and rebuttal of the Washington Post’s attempts to re-write history and help the Biden administration manufacture consent for imperial aggression against the socialist government of Bolivia. In that piece, I started a conversation about the workings of the Chomsky-Herman “Propaganda Model” as it applied to real time news events. Today I’d like to return to that discussion; with a slight twist. Whereas last time we talked about Pig Empire foreign policy and debunked a single piece of mainstream media propaganda, this time we’re going to look at a domestic “crisis” and examine how that story is being spun by a diverse range of actors operating within the propaganda model.

To understand why that’s worth studying, let’s turn to professor Noam Chomsky’s further elaborations on how Pig Empire propaganda functions in a society that, on the surface, appears to have an unfettered media protected by the First Amendment:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

With that in mind, we’re going to examine the coverage of “the migrant crisis at the U.S. border” and the nested layers of propaganda built up around this story. If the Chomsky-Herman model holds true, what we should see is a vigorous, seemingly multi-faceted debate, that nevertheless supports ruling class or imperial policy on all “sides.” The catch is, I’m not going to take the easy way out and spend this article merely refuting the Republican Party’s nativist propaganda about undocumented migrants. We’re also going to look at how the mainstream “centrist” media’s debunking of that reactionary and racist propaganda itself still fits perfectly into our propaganda model.

So, what is the nativist GOP position exactly? Keeping in mind that we already know this is racist culture war bullshit, it looks something like this:

 

• There is an out of control crisis at the U.S. southern border with Mexico that threatens national security, the safety of all Americans, and indeed the very fabric of our society.
• That crisis is the result of a “surge” in foreign migrants with “bogus” asylum claims, bringing coronavirus, drugs, and terrorists to America, while trying to illegally cross the border.
• The blame for this crisis falls squarely on newly-inaugurated president Joe Biden; who as part of his left wing extremist “open borders” policy has dismantled former president Donald Trump’s completely effective immigration policy.
• The only solution to this crisis is to restore Trump’s immigration policy and finish building “the Wall” on the southern border.

 

Look, if you’re dumb enough to believe cracker Republicans agitating for a white nationalist immigration policy sincerely care about the humane treatment of undocumented migrants, this piece probably isn’t for you. As you’ll quickly see in our highlighted articles below, these talking points are pretty much just a big cynical ball of overt racism, misrepresentations, and easily debunkable lies. The reason all of this sounds like a reworked version of Trump’s fascist “migrant caravan invasion” scare in the lead up to the U.S. 2018 midterm elections, is because that is exactly what’s going on here from a performative political perspective.

As I said above however, the situation cannot be waved away by simply pointing out that Republicans are pushing white nationalist conspiracy theories and lies; there is in fact a crisis here, Biden is contributing to the problem already, and unconscionable suffering is being caused by a ongoing failure in American policy as we speak. Furthermore that political failure extends far beyond the U.S. border, or even the horrors of US immigration policy; locking up migrants is a longstanding, completely bipartisan solution to a never-ending crisis spawned by American foreign policy and Pig Empire capitalist looting throughout Latin America.

Ultimately then, it is around these uncomfortable truths, not racist Republican lies, that much of the “liberal” mainstream media propaganda in this discussion revolves. As the so-called “migrant crisis” debate is spun, de-spun, and re-spun again for political purposes by a wholly bipartisan propaganda machine, let’s take a look at how the sausage is made:

 

Republicans are fabricating the border crisis

I decided to start us off with this widely-reproduced opinion piece by former United States Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, because I think it represents the very best of mainstream liberal rebuttals to the GOP “border crisis” scare. On the whole, Reich is correct; GOP outrage about a standard seasonal increase in the number of migrants at the U.S. border is a cynical ploy to manufacture political capital out of a bunch of racist lies and extremely distorted misrepresentations. Furthermore, Reich absolutely deserves a little credit for being one of the few public commentators to make the explicit connection between the GOP’s “crisis at the border” propaganda and their utterly baseless accusations of ongoing election fraud:

"But the “surge” has been fabricated by Republicans in order to stoke fear — and, not incidentally, to justify changes in laws they say are necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting.

Republicans continue to allege — without proof — that the 2020 election was rife with fraudulent ballots, many from undocumented immigrants. Over the past six weeks they’ve introduced some 250 bills in 43 states designed to make it harder for people to vote — especially the young, the poor, Black people and Hispanic Americans, all of whom are likely to vote for Democrats — by eliminating mail-in ballots, reducing times for voting, decreasing the number of drop-off boxes, demanding proof of citizenship, even making it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.

To stop this, Democrats are trying to enact a sweeping voting rights bill called the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering and keeps dark money out of elections. It already passed the House, but Republicans in the Senate are fighting it with more lies.

On Wednesday, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas falsely claimed the new bill would register millions of undocumented immigrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too.

The core message of the Republican Party now consists of lies about a “crisis” of violent immigrants crossing the border, lies that they’re voting illegally, and blatantly anti-democratic restrictions on voting to counter these trumped-up crises."

Certainly then, reading this article makes you more accurately informed than you would be if you simply took the nativist Republican propaganda at face value; so what’s the problem? Well, for starters, while Reich is absolutely correct that the GOP is lying for political advantage, the premise of his entire article is still wrong because there is an ongoing crisis; something Reich even admits once, before never mentioning again, in the following throwaway paragraph:

"To be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis of children detained in overcrowded border facilities. And an even worse humanitarian tragedy in the violence and political oppression in Central America, worsened by U.S. policies over the years, that’s driving migration in the first place."

I’ll avoid speculating on how Reich could have missed the obvious contradiction between the title of his article and the contents of the above paragraph, but given his efforts to portray the Biden administration as a solution to these problems, both here and elsewhere, I don’t imagine the riddle will be too hard to solve for the astute observer. While I wouldn’t say Reich is lying, the use of framing and focus to bolster a Biden administration whose policies will continue the very humanitarian crisis and tragedy Reich observes here, is objectively dishonest.

Even more inexplicably, Reich also finds time in his busy day to push a wholly ahistorical vision of a bygone, non-nativist Republican Party and an American foreign policy that supports democracy, the rule of law, and human rights:

"The party that once championed lower taxes, smaller government, states’ rights and a strong national defense now has more in common with anti-democratic regimes and racist-nationalist political movements around the world than with America’s avowed ideals of democracy, rule of law and human rights."

Frankly I don’t even have words for how much jingoist bullshit is packed into this sentence; and given that Reich absolutely knows enough political history to be aware of the nativist movement, paleoconservatism, and the post-Goldwater reactionary right in the GOP, it’s hard to wave this away as an honest mistake. What is inarguable here however is that even while debunking racist lies and Republican propaganda, Reich is actively misrepresenting the nature of the crisis in a way that helps portions of the ruling establishment; namely Biden’s State Department, the prison industrial complex, and so-called moderate conservatives.

 

There are a lot of lies about Biden’s “border crisis”

If Reich’s opinion piece above represents the best of the mainstream liberal rebuttals to GOP “border crisis” talking points, then this jumped up blog post by Mehdi Hasan over at MSNBC is probably a good example of the worst liberal media influencers have to offer. Which of course isn’t to say that Mehdi is bullshitting precisely, just that this article debunking Republican propaganda, is in and of itself, a form of mainstream establishment propaganda; let’s talk briefly about why.

As in our first article, Hasan builds his argument on a solid-enough foundation; namely the idea that Republicans are lying about Biden’s immigration policies and the “crisis at the border” issue:

"The reality is that much of our current frenzy over immigration, and the so-called crisis at the southern border, has been driven through a series of cynical right-wing talking points, promulgated by Republican politicians and amplified by a conservative media echo chamber.

The spin they’ve spewed is based on a dangerous mix of lies, half-truths and exaggerations that have spread like wildfire through the rest of U.S. media."

What follows is a sort of bog-standard, Wonkette-style refutation of the most unhinged GOP talking points; yes we still have a border, no Trump didn’t solve immigration, no Biden is not for open borders, and so on. From feeding fascist Nick Fury his own eyepatch, to fact-checking the other Congresswoman from QAnon, Hasan lines up the most craven liars in the Republican Party and chops them down with rudimentary facts. Of course, what’s missing here is even the bare minimum sort of context we saw in Reich’s work; the author is damn certain the GOP is full of shit, and none of this is Joe Biden’s fault, but he can’t be bothered to talk about who might be responsible either.

This piece proves that Republicans lie, the media is addicted to sensational headlines, and Joe Biden is a conservative; all of which rate slightly above “water is wet” as revelations go. There is no mention of the Pig Empire foreign, economic, and immigration enforcement policies that have driven the immigration crisis in America for decades, whatsoever. Indeed, the closest Hasan comes to offering any sort of pushback or further context here is a pithy qualifier about Biden’s policies being “unfortunate,” and blithely expressing his barest of wishes for more open borders.

Look; I’m sure there’s someone out there who’ll find Hasan’s offering useful, if only to win Twitter arguments with shit-tier “conservatives.” By that same measure however, I certainly wouldn’t describe folks who enjoyed this piece as members of the informed public either. By failing to even touch on the root causes of America’s immigration carceral machine, the author effectively preempts the possibility that his readers will start looking for solutions to that problem that may upset establishment power; an activity that is wholly consistent with our propaganda model theory.

 

Why the Media Wants a Crisis at the Border

Hell yes, now we’re cooking with a little bit of gas. In our third article, TNR’s Alex Shephard eventually moves beyond debunking GOP talking points and into a critique that might threaten to expose institutional power. Of course, that institution is a for-profit media establishment that literally everyone hates; but given how much carnage we already know these folks are responsible for, you can’t say they haven’t earned it. Additionally, and like the two previous authors, Shephard has the advantage of actually being right about the principle thrust of his argument; the corporate Beltway media is so desperate to sell controversy, that they’ll happily launder nativist GOP lies with little regard for their veracity, or who it harms.

Even on that front however, Shephard’s critique is quite limited; focusing primarily on Politico Playbook and the Sunday news shows, while actually defending some institutional actors. The author also assumes the media’s willingness to push nativist talking points comes from a position of feckless venality; the idea that they might be manufacturing consent for the powerful simply doesn’t come up. There is no mention of the media’s prominent historic efforts to push nativist ideology; let alone Joe Biden’s legislative role in building the very concentration camp system he’s now being pressured to dismantle by folks that still remember election slogans about “kids in cages.”

The ultimate story Alex tells here is that some selfish, rating-crazed networks are helping racist scaremongers interfere with the very serious people trying solve the immigration carceral problem, because the political media have nothing better to talk about. Disappointingly then, the author’s strongest challenge to draconian immigration practices that have always enjoyed bipartisan support across the American political class, is to call the problem of child migrants “particularly vexing.” As for policy causes, I’m afraid this milquetoast bit in the closing paragraph is the best Shephard has to offer:

"The surge at the border is complicated and requires empathy and a focus on the profound human cost of America’s draconian, imperialistic immigration and foreign policy. It is, in other words, a story the mainstream press is particularly bad at covering."

To be fair, this is all true; as are Shephard’s notes about dynamic causative factors like American involvement in the illegal narcotics trade, and a global warming-fueled hurricane season from hell. These are important facts, and they certainly beat nativist lies and fear campaigns. Unfortunately, given that the rest of the article is undeniably apologetics for a Biden administration that most certainly could do something to help migrant families and children seeking asylum, yet simply refuses to do so; this tepid pushback is not nearly enough to disqualify this piece as propaganda under our model.

 

Claim of ‘kids in cages’ hypocrisy is missing context

While I’ve been extremely critical of the articles we’ve looked at to this point as potential sources of quality information, they do on the whole represent the type of slick and effective propaganda that corporate media in the Pig Empire is well known for. Focusing more on lies by omission and a failure to provide context than outright deceptions, each of these articles is designed to both de-spin racist right wing propaganda, and re-spin the facts to protect the (now) ruling “liberal” establishment in America. This is fairly subtle stuff that works by controlling how readers think about this subject, rather than overtly telling them what to think; and that’s a big part of why it’s effective.

As our fourth article, by Jude Joffe-Block of AP News demonstrates however, the machine is not always that crafty; sometimes the media establishment uses outright lies to tell you what to think directly:

"The Claim: The same people who criticized how immigrant children were treated under the Trump administration and claimed Trump put “kids in cages” are now okay with the Biden administration doing the same thing.

AP's Assessment: Missing context. Biden is reopening a surge facility first opened by Trump for teenagers who arrive at the border without their parents. A different facility, run by the Border Patrol, was a major focus of the “kids in cages” criticism in 2018, largely because the Trump administration held children there in cells partitioned with chain-link fencing after separating them from their parents. That family separation policy is no longer in effect."

"The posts are missing the context that the controversy over “kids in cages” that emerged during the Trump administration was largely focused on the policy of separating families and then holding children in enclosures partitioned with chain-link fencing. In many cases, authorities failed to keep records to reunite families.

A Border Patrol center in McAllen, Texas, that used chain-link fencing became the focal point for critics of Trump when his administration housed children there who had just been separated from parents or other relatives at the border. The children slept on mats on the floor with foil sheets, according to Associated Press reporting and government photos."

As someone who has extensively studied America’s bipartisan history of warehousing brown kids in concentration camps, let me emphatically state that the main thrust of this argument is pure malarkey.

The larger discussion about concentration camps and locking kids in cages went far beyond one specific facility, and it didn’t have a goddamn thing to do with what the walls of those prison cells were made of. While the cruelty of the swine emperor’s policies, including Stephen Miller’s family separation policy, featured prominently in the discussion about migrant concentration camps that spawned the phrase “kids in cages,” it is utterly ahistorical to pretend the righteous outrage against Trump wasn’t also about locking little children up in prison. I know because I wrote about precisely this issue back in 2019:

"Of course acknowledging much of this then leaves us with a number of uncomfortable truths to address, while simultaneously revealing openings for reactionaries, collaborators and apologists to justify continuing along the path towards unspeakable horrors. After all, if migrant detention centers are concentration camps, and concentration camps are part of the process of genocide, then that means American society started that process long before the election of swine emperor Donald Trump.

Confronting reality and halting the progress of genocide requires us to acknowledge that the dehumanization, persecution and criminalization of all manner of politically convenient migrants has a long and often distinctly bipartisan history in America. At a very minimum, it requires us to admit in the present that former U.S President Barack Obama also built concentration camps, locked innocent children in cages and deported millions of migrants while most of society shrugged; our collective legacy of silence has undoubtedly empowered and will continue to empower horrifying men like Stephen Miller until we as a people are prepared to acknowledge our own culpability and cowardice in the face of these mounting atrocities."

Much as in the Washington Post’s propaganda attack against Bolivia, the author of this AP News “fact-checking” article is crassly lying and hoping you won’t notice. This is unquestionably poor form; although I guess you could give her bonus points for framing the entire discussion as Republican nonsense, while ignoring prominent critics of Biden’s migrant jails for kids on the left. The obvious implication here is that Biden is a better jailer than Trump was; which is almost certainly true, but begs the question – how hard is it to improve on a fascist who denied imprisoned children access to soap? More importantly, what does any of that have to do Biden’s decision to continue jailing migrant children seeking asylum?

Let’s just move on.

 

Adjusting the Lens

Alright, at this point I think we’ve taken a good look at the spin, de-spin, and re-spin style of partisan media propaganda surrounding the current migrant “crisis” debate. Liberals might be upset that I spent more time picking on pro-Biden hacks than unhinged nativists, but keep in mind that we started from the position that the Republicans were dishing racist bullshit and three of the four articles we’ve studied so far were very effective in proving that portion of the argument. So that’s a wrap, right?

Not so fast. While it’s certainly important to understand how the media spin cycle has worked to shape public opinion about this iteration of the migrant crisis story, that still doesn’t mean we know very much about the story itself. In order to move past the surface propaganda and get into the guts of why all this is happening, we’re going to have to look directly at those uncomfortable truths and institutional actors these media muppets are working to obscure. Let’s explore four articles that directly attack or expose propaganda about the migrant crisis, and in doing so reveal America’s dark secrets about capitalism, imperialism, and the migration carceral complex:

 

Did CNN Air a Staged Migrant Crossing?

I’d like to start us off with this fascinating article (and its follow-up) by Marcia Brown over at American Prospect because they both expose the dirty deeds and self-interested motivations of a number of important players in manufacturing the migrant crisis. As the title here implies, Brown’s primary focus is a story featuring suspicious migrant crossing footage, narrated by national correspondent Ed Lavandera and broadcast by CNN on March 12th, 2021. While you should definitely read the entire piece, I’ll spare you the suspense by saying yes, it sure as shit does look like CNN aired a staged migrant crossing for ratings in the middle of a fascist-manufactured moral panic about a migrant “surge” at the border.

Even more disturbing is the fact that it took activists and expert observers only a bare minimum of digging to tie the scene CNN filmed to an anti-migrant Republican candidate in Texas, and a nativist propaganda “news” website. When confronted with these allegations, CNN responded by reflexively denying everything, attacking a strawman, and then going after journalists at the American Prospect. Given that there’s video evidence of the nativists filming the CNN crew that is in turn filming their Potemkin migrant crossing however, there is little reason to believe the company’s protestations.

Presumably, readers don’t need me to explain why a major news network working with GOP-aligned racists, to mass broadcast home movies about migrants surging across the border in rafts, fits in well with our propaganda model; it’s pretty self-evident. What might interest you to note however is that none of the other corporate “liberal” networks pushing border hysteria reported on this story at all; although Fox News couldn’t resist taking a shot at CNN even though it harmed their own migrant invasion narratives. I guess Brown’s story might have hit a little too close to home for the nightly news.

Don’t get me wrong here; the author still wastes a lot of words framing the very real crisis caused by longstanding American policies in terms that the Biden administration would find acceptable, and if she mentions foreign policy at all, I must’ve missed it. What sets this piece and its important follow-up out from the others however, and is likely the real reason Brown’s story didn’t conform enough to be tolerated inside the propaganda system, is when she credibly implicates the U.S. Border Patrol and its powerful union, the National Border Patrol Council, in helping to stage and disseminate the video.

Why would those crackers do such a thing? For the same reason they endorsed swine emperor Trump twice; because if folks ever got the impression locking up brown people wasn’t necessary for the survival of our beloved Fatherland, they’d literally all be out of a job. The truth to absorb before we move on here is that there’s a lot of money sloshing around the migrant carceral system; and plenty of institutional actors are prepared to manufacture consent for locking up migrants, just so they can get a slice of the pie.

 

Companies Eye Child Migrant Detention Contracts

So besides politicians, the media, and border pigs, what kind of institutional actors are we talking about here? Well, one good example would be private prison mega-corporations who’ve been salivating for federal contract dollars ever since Biden made the ill-advised decision to exclude migrant detention facilities from his order not to renew contracts with privately operated prisons. Do you think there just might be a connection between a gigantic private prison lobby in American politics and unhinged Republicans pushing conspiracy theories about migrants and demanding more enforcement? Keep in mind, there are literally millions, if not billions of dollars at stake here.

As for migrant children specifically, well it turns out they’re worth as much as seven hundred and fifty dollars a day each to the private prison industry; which is a pretty penny for Uncle Sam to shell out for inhumane confinement conditions and rampant sexual abuse. In this Intercept article published on March 14th, 2021, immigration analyst and author John Washington looks at the horrifying track record of two of those companies that may be in the running for child migrant detention contracts; Serco Group and Caliburn International, current home of ex-Trump official and noted nativist baby-killer, John F. Kelly.

Off topic? Maybe; but when you find yourself looking at the nexus of politics, money, and flagrant abuse of migrant children in for-profit concentration camps, it certainly does become a lot easier to understand why the ruling establishment and their media muppets would rather you focus on partisan spin.

 

Detention Photos Highlight Biden’s Border Secrecy

Speaking of trying to control the narrative, boy Joe Biden sure screwed up bigtime with his press blackout at the border, didn’t he? I don’t know if this administration has ever heard of the Streisand effect, but as many commentators noted, even the Klepto Kaiser allowed media into his migrant concentration camps; albeit, only after a battle and primarily to advertise their cruelty for political purposes. As “commitments to transparency” go, I’d say the Biden Bunch is off to a very poor start on multiple fronts:

"The Associated Press has requested access to border facilities for more than a month. Reporters first asked Health and Human Services on Feb. 4 to allow entry into a surge facility re-opened at Carrizo Springs, Texas, holding hundreds of teenagers. And they have asked Homeland Security officials for access at least seven times to Border Patrol facilities, with no response. The AP has also petitioned Psaki to open border facilities."

"Under Biden, the agencies also have denied full access to nonprofit lawyers who conduct oversight of facilities where children are detained. Those oversight visits occur under a federal court settlement.

When lawyers this month visited the Border Patrol facility at Donna, where thousands of children are now detained, agents refused to let them inside and the Justice Department said they were not entitled to gain access. The lawyers were forced to interview children outside. The Justice Department declined to comment."

Of course, if I were responsible for the conditions that lead to the outrage-inducing photos of migrant youths corralled in inflatable tents that featured in this March 2021 PBS article, I’d probably try to keep that shit a secret too. Mind you, hiding the tent city for kids in Donna, does nothing to keep the migrant warehouse at Carrizo Springs off the public’s radar; a prison is a prison after all. Hey, at least Joe dodged a bullet when he saw which way the wind was blowing and decided not to re-open an infamous kid kennel built on top of a superfund site. Instead, we’re shipping kids off to “a highly contaminated and potentially hazardous military base” called, incredibly, Fort Bliss.

Look, we know that the specific “migrant surge at the border” panic is a bunch of nativist Republican fuckery, being pushed without nuance, by suckers and outrage merchants in the corporate media. As we’ve seen however, there is in fact a horrifying humanitarian and political crisis going on here. Furthermore, all kinds of powerful institutional actors are making huge bank off the migrant carceral industry that’s being fueled by that crisis. And finally, the Biden administration (and thus, its apologists in the media) absolutely do have something to hide; namely, American concentration camps for brown kids.

The upside here is that it only took dissecting seven articles and skimming over a hundred citation links for us to arrive at something resembling an objective understanding of this story; surely that won’t be any trouble for Jenny Six-Pack to pull off after work and before she does anything important, like vote.

 

Biden’s Plan for Central America Is a Smokescreen

All of which leaves us with only one remaining fig leaf, popular among both liberals and progressives, obscuring the craven rapacity of this administration and the whole rotten immigration carceral system. Specifically, the presumption that while the humanitarian crisis is tragic, locking up brown kids is barbaric, and wrongheaded American policies are driving migration, the situation is temporary because the Biden administration means well, and intends to fix those broken policies. Even setting aside the reality that Biden currently refuses to end Title 42 and expand the refugee cap, this theory just doesn’t hold water. Biden helped create this system, and his ideas aren’t going to get us out of a trap made from capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy.

To demonstrate the point, let’s turn to Aviva Chomsky writing about Joe Biden’s stated plans for Central America in The Nation:

"Instead of solidarity (or even partnership) with Central America, Biden’s plan actually promotes an old economic development model that has long benefited US corporations. It also aims to impose a distinctly militarized version of “security” on the people of that region. In addition, it focuses on enlisting Central American governments and, in particular, their militaries to contain migration through the use of repression."

"Read closely, a significant portion of Biden’s immigration proposal focuses on the premise that addressing the root causes of Central America’s problems will reduce the flow of immigrants to the US border. In its own words, the Biden plan promises to promote “the rule of law, security, and economic development in Central America” in order to “address the key factors” contributing to emigration. Buried in its fuzzy language, however, are long-standing bipartisan Washington goals that should sound familiar to those who have been paying attention in these years.

Their essence: that millions of dollars in “aid” money should be poured into upgrading local military and police forces in order to protect an economic model based on private investment and the export of profits. Above all, the privileges of foreign investors must not be threatened. As it happens, this is the very model that Washington has imposed on the countries of Central America over the past century, one that’s left its lands corrupt, violent, and impoverished, and so continued to uproot Central Americans and send them fleeing toward the United States.

Crucial to Biden’s plan, as to those of his predecessors, is another key element: to coerce Mexico and Guatemala into serving as proxies for the wall only partially built along the southern US border and proudly promoted by presidents from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump."

In other words, Joe Biden intends to solve the Orwellian “mess” he inherited from Donald Trump, by enacting the exact same policies, in the exact same ways as the presidents who literally caused the crisis; including Donald Trump. This isn’t some sort of big secret; the folks telling you to have patience have access to Biden’s public statements, reported decisions, and stated policies. Nor is it a matter of Chomsky’s opinion; she’s not the only one who noticed, and these polices are being enacted in real time as we speak.

Liberal thought leaders can posture about the precise definition of “kids in cages” all they like, but apologists for the Biden regime can’t have it both ways. You can’t howl about the systemic nature of the real crisis, and then pretend giving migrant kids locked in concentration camps a toothbrush and continuing on with neoliberal colonialism in Latin America, constitutes a solution to that systemic crisis; no matter how patient we promise to be. And why, pray tell, are these folks dissembling and playing word games? Once again the answer is because there’s big money for the Pig Empire ruling classes on the line here:

"The model Washington continues to promote is based on the idea that, if Central American governments can woo foreign investors with improved infrastructure, tax breaks, and weak environmental and labor laws, the “free market” will deliver the investment, jobs, and economic growth that (in theory) will keep people from wanting to migrate in the first place. Over and over again in Central America’s tormented history, however, exactly the opposite has happened. Foreign investment flowed in, eager to take advantage of the region’s fertile lands, natural resources, and cheap labor. This form of development—whether in support of banana and coffee plantations in the 19th century or sugar, cotton, and cattle operations after World War II—brought Central America to its revolutions of the 1980s and its north-bound mass migration of today.

As a model, it relies on militarized governments to dispossess peasant farmers, freeing the land for foreign investors. Similarly, force and terror are brought to bear to maintain a cheap and powerless working class, allowing investors to pay little and reap fantastic profits. Such operations, in turn, have brought deforestation to the countryside, while their cheap exports to the United States and elsewhere have helped foster the high-consumption lifestyles that have only accelerated climate change—bringing ever fiercer weather, including the rising sea levels, more intense storms, droughts, and floods that have further undermined the livelihoods of the Central American poor."

Hot damn; now we’re really peeling back the layers and smashing head-cages imposed by the propaganda system. What Chomsky is talking about in this essay, which should be read in full, is nothing less than a type of militarized economic imperialism that allows American corporations and investors to extract wealth from Latin American nations on an order many magnitudes greater than some pithy private prison corporation. Forget merely lying on TV; people would commit unspeakable crimes for that kind of money, and as a nation, we most certainly have already.

Folks, this isn’t just the kind of story you won’t find on the news; this is the reality that the partisan blather they do put out as news, is designed to prevent you from seeing. And whether propagandists in the public eye like it or not, Biden’s stated intention is to continue the cycle of violence and plunder even if it means separating families in Mexico or locking up brown kids on a toxic military base. What Biden, his flunkies in the media, and indeed much of the ruling establishment really care about here, is keeping your attention focused elsewhere while rich people count the spoils.

 

The Words They’ll Never Say

The truth is that the whole story of the crisis driving migrants to the borders of America and the larger Pig Empire, is centuries old and extraordinarily complex. It is a tale rooted in colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism, exploitation, and unimaginable violence. Understanding how we got here requires understanding not only a broken, bipartisan immigration politics designed to court nativist votes, but also the soul of a nation that has spent its entire existence pushing its aborted reckonings with genocide and slavery, out to an imagined frontier. That’s a hard story to cram into eight inches of column space.

Nevertheless, what isn’t difficult is explaining what the so-called migrant crisis really is, and why our wealthy establishment will never willingly allow it to end. Through the exercise of violence, terror, and imperial power, American capitalists have transformed most of Latin America into a thinly-veiled slave enterprise; a steady supply of guns and bombs go in, while fantastic profits pour out, leaving hyper-exploited migrants fleeing the fallout. Naturally, the ruling classes who profit from this enterprise have little concern for the costs and consequences involved here; after all, the state buys the bombs and pays to police the migrants.

The horrifying ingenuity of this business model is not just that the cost of running it is paid from public coffers however. The truly diabolical part is that through the magic of neoliberal privatization, the ruling classes have transformed every aspect of managing this fallout into its own business. Military enforcement is a business, infrastructure lending is a business, hiding all of this from you is a business. Indeed, the crisis itself is a business in which refugees are transformed into TV ratings, votes, bribes, and a migrant carceral system worth billions of dollars. Furthermore, the existence of each of these enterprises in turn, creates another layer of institutional actors committed to perpetuating the carnage.

That is ultimately both why, and how, the propaganda model is enforced when discussing migrants in the public discourse; as it turns out the capitalist hydra has a lot of mouths to feed, and there’s still some shit you’re not allowed to say on television.

 

 

Additional Recommended Reading

All-American Nativism by Daniel Denvir

Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal by Aviva Chomsky

The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin

Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky

Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky

Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti

Yesterday’s Man: the Case Against Joe Biden by Branko Marcetic

 

 

• nina illingworth

 

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”