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posted by martyb on Friday August 24 2018, @04:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.

NPR has an August 23rd, 2018 story about the original "A-TEAM" (Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower), a 1965 project to replace migrant workers with high school kids on summer break.

The year was 1965. On Cinco de Mayo, newspapers across the country reported that Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz wanted to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to replace the hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers who had labored in the United States under the so-called Bracero Program. Started in World War II, the program was an agreement between the American and Mexican governments that brought Mexican men to pick harvests across the U.S. It ended in 1964, after years of accusations by civil rights activists like Cesar Chavez that migrants suffered wage theft and terrible working and living conditions.

But farmers complained — in words that echo today's headlines — that Mexican laborers did the jobs that Americans didn't want to do, and that the end of [the program] meant that crops would rot in the fields.

[...] the national press was immediately skeptical. "Dealing with crops which grow close to the ground requires a good deal stronger motive" than money or the prospects of a good workout, argued a Detroit Free Press editorial. "Like, for instance, gnawing hunger."

[One group] got paid minimum wage — $1.40 an hour back then — plus 5 cents for every crate filled with about 30 to 36 [melons.] [Students] worked six days a week, with Sundays off, and they were not allowed to return home during their stint. The farmers sheltered them in... "defunct housing" [according to one student].

Problems arose immediately... In California's Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers... quit after just two weeks on the job... Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

[Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores] says the A-TEAM "reveals a very important reality: It's not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It's about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages."

The kids gave up their summer vacations, worked in 110 degree heat six days a week, slept with no air conditioning, and ate subsistence rations, for nearly no benefit; it's no wonder the program was not a rousing success.

In tangentially-related news, the U.S. Libertarian Party published a press release the day before entitled "Immigrants Benefit the United States" that makes the blanket assertion "Immigrants, almost across the board, are a net value to the United States."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @04:44PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @04:44PM (#725896)

    I've studied both Christianity and Islam, and you know what? Islam is scary as fuck compared to Christianity.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday August 24 2018, @06:32PM (6 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday August 24 2018, @06:32PM (#725962)

    It all depends on which form of Islam, and which form of Christianity.

    Some forms of Islam:
    Sufis? Not scary at all, they mostly just want to sit around doing mystical stuff and writing poetry.
    Wahabists? Very scary, those are the guys that are responsible for ISIS, Al Qaida, and most of the other Muslim terrorist efforts in recent decades. And yet for some reason the US is allied with the Wahabist Saudis, a move that I still don't understand outside of personal business relationships between the Bush and ibn Saud families.
    Kurds? Not scary at all to westerners, and indeed they've been allies of the US for a long time, and were doing a lot of the fighting against ISIS which should give them some kind of credit.
    Mainstream Shias? Not very scary unless you're Israeli or Sunni. The Israeli thing has more to do with political stuff than religious stuff, namely that Israel took their friends' land. A lot of these guys were involved in fighting ISIS as well. The Sunni-Shia feud has of course been raging for centuries.
    Mainstream Sunnis? Also not very scary unless you're Israeli or Shia, for mostly the same reasons.

    Some forms of Christianity:
    Quakers? These guys are pacifists, so at worst harmless.
    Dominionists? Very scary, those are the guys that are trying to bring about the apocalypse on purpose and hasten the Second Coming. Their influence on the US government is one of the reasons that the US has decided that Israel's fight to take land from the mainstream Sunnis and Shias is the US's fight too.
    Anglicans? Not scary at all, unless you're Irish. I don't think I need to educate you as to the history of why.
    Mainstream Catholics? Not very scary unless you're an altar boy.
    Mainstream Protestants (Methodists, Lutherans, etc)? Also not very scary.

    It's not the religious belief system that really makes the difference, it's the flip where you decide "We disagree with those people, so let's go kill them!" As soon as you've decided that's the solution to your problems, you're capable of atrocity. And of course there's plenty of atrocity that's been committed both by Muslims and Christians and atheists over the years.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @07:11PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @07:11PM (#725982)

      "And yet for some reason the US is allied with the Wahabist Saudis, a move that I still don't understand outside of personal business relationships between the Bush and ibn Saud families."

      uhh, this is what allows the US and Israel to do what it wants to do?

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @07:38PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @07:38PM (#725991)

      and burning people alive, and taking sex slaves. And, they're doing this on a geopolitical level; we're not talking about some weirdo cult outside Seattle. Sorry, bud, but Christian wackos are not in the same league, and I can't understand why you insist on pretending that they are.

      If you look back through history, you can see that Islam was not only very expansionist, but was the first aggressor, with the Christian Crusades being a retaliation for centuries of Islamic warring and European enslavement; and, while Christianity has moved beyond Christendom, Islam is still very much a totalitarian political system—it is an entire blueprint for society, not just a reason to sing songs on Sunday.

      Yeah, you can find very nice Muslims, and you can find very vile Christians. So what?

      Christianity poses ZERO threat to civilization, and has arguably been a driving force behind the development of the Enlightenment, which gave birth to the modern world. Why? Because mainstream Christianity has always demanded faith based on reason—it has always stated that the world is rational because God is rational, and the best way to honor God is to try to understand his work, and built atop it; that's why even early Catholic doctrine was steeped in logical argumentation, not based on the words of even a prophet, but rather on the works of a pre-Christian pagan, Aristotle, who was viewed by Christians as being THE Philosopher. In contrast, Islam demands absolute, unquestioning submission to "God", and the ideas of a non-believer are either suspect as a rule, or only useful tools insofar as they help spread Islam.

      It's the way it is, man. Islam is no friend of the West. It's just not. That's why Christianity and the West grew together, not Islam and the West. You're playing with dangerous things.

      • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday August 24 2018, @09:02PM (3 children)

        by Thexalon (636) on Friday August 24 2018, @09:02PM (#726025)

        My point of criticism is this: No matter what label you slap on it, any time you get into the mindset of "We're the Good Guys, they're the Bad Guys, and we must destroy them using whatever means available, period, end of discussion", bad things start to happen. If your reaction to "We recently killed a busload of Muslim kids in Yemen" is "One busload down, thousands more to go", then you have exactly the same tendencies as the kinds of people that flew planes into the World Trade Center. And if you think Christians are incapable of this kind of thinking, think again. Jews are also entirely capable of thinking this way, as are pagans, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and Voudoun believers, because this is a universal human phenomenon. The moment you think "People like *me* couldn't do anything this terrible", that's exactly when they'll prove you wrong.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:26PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:26PM (#726032)

          Why was that busload of kids being bombed?

          There is a geopolitical war going on. This is no joke; this is not mere bigotry. The inherent tension between Islam and the West is at the core of it all; Islam is not compatible with the West—it has been an adversary since its very inception, and it has not evolved alongside all the values you hold dear as a Westerner. This is very serious.

          • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday August 24 2018, @11:53PM (1 child)

            by Thexalon (636) on Friday August 24 2018, @11:53PM (#726082)

            Why was that busload of kids being bombed?

            There's a civil war going on in Yemen and has been for almost a decade, and the Muslims who have the support of the US and Saudis are fighting the Muslims who have the support of the Iranians. The Saudis were apparently responsible for targeting said busload of kids, and have provided no official explanation for why they were hit. This all has very little to do with your "clash of civilizations" way of thinking and everything to do with making sure the spiceoil flows the way the US wants it to.

            And your reaction highlights perfectly what I'm on about: If I had told you just "Somebody bombed a busload of kids", most people's reaction is along the lines of "That's terrible! Who would do such a thing?" And if I had told you that somebody from Yemen had blown up an American bus full of kids, you'd probably be thinking something along the lines of "Those monsters! Kill them all!" But since it's "Our" side bombing a busload of "Their" kids, all of a sudden it's "There's gotta be some sort of justification for it". It's the same act in all 3 versions, where somebody engages in violence kills a bunch of kids, but your reaction changes depending on which kids and who pulled the trigger. And that demonstrates how your own group identification is warping your sense of morality. This is exactly the human tendency that murderous organizations exploit to get otherwise ordinary people interested in slaughtering other people.

            --
            The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @03:12AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @03:12AM (#726128)

              You see, I come from the civilized world, where it is understood that a busload of kids getting bombed is a terrible thing, and thus there's no reason to virtue signal by saying so explicitly.

              The reason those kids got bombed is because of Islam.