💌Hanlon’s Reader #13: November Newsletter
"Every leap of civilization was built on the back of a disposable workforce, but I can only make so many." 👨🔬🌆
💌 Monthly Update: November 2024
Hello Readers,
There are only 30 days in November! I should have sent this yesterday. 🤦♂️
OK, so last time we talked about the meaning of life—how when I was 13 the answer I came up with during a rite-of-passage dinner with my parents was to be happy. But eventually I thought that was too simple because I also believe in the golden rule: treat others the way I’d like to be treated. If we do things only for our own happiness, eventually it comes at others’ expense.
Fundamentally, this belief is probably why I lean left politically. But at the same time I can’t deny that being rich sounds, to be blunt, pretty awesome. Even just having necessary expenses covered, a safety net for emergencies, and enough money to live comfortably in retirement is a fucking fantasy for most people.
What must it feel like to have as much income, wealth, and power as America’s 800 billionaires?
The top five billionaires by individual wealth are:
Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $252.5 billion
Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $204.8 billion
Larry Ellison of Oracle fame moving into number three spot with $197 billion, surpassing Marc Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $182 billion
Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway with $141 billion.
There are now a total of 12 billionaires with more than $100 billion each. For context, the first person to cross the $100 billion personal wealth threshold — Jeff Bezos — only did so in 2018.
Chuck Collins in “801 U.S. billionaires hold a combined $6.22 trillion in wealth”
https://inequality.org/great-divide/billionaire-wealth-keeps-growing/
In America, we already lived in an oligarchy before Trump was elected the first time in 2016, let alone now in 2024 that we’ve basically crowned him as King of America by giving him immunity to past and future crimes. And while normal people struggle to make ends meet, once again the billionaires are going to take more and more from us.
More tax cuts at the top. More deregulation. More teeth on the meat grinder of American life, to crush us into a finer grain for consumption by the rich.
Money doesn’t trickle down, it’s snatched up. The rich and powerful are stealing from us and they are going to pull off the biggest theft of American wealth in history by gutting the federal government with complete immunity from accountability. Republicans are licking their chops at cutting the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security… nothing is safe anymore.
Nobody needs a billion dollars in personal wealth. But we’re going to give the people at the top even more for some reason. And when the American economy takes a nosedive, the wealthiest among us are not only insulated from danger—they are in a position to buy while the rest of us suffer. They don’t care if they drive the car off a cliff because they’ve got parachutes.
Which brings us to the second Trump Administration’s plan to deport over 10 million undocumented immigrants from the US over the next 4 years. There’s still a lot up in the air about this plan—like most of what Trump says, we don’t know how much is just racist blustering and how much is going to become official policy.
Fundamentally unrealistic to deport 11 million people (4% of the US population)
Logistics involved with rounding up, arresting, detaining, processing, and removing this many people would cost hundreds of billions of dollars
Trump is directly inspired by the Eisenhower Administration’s horrifically racist Operation Wetback and the FDR Administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act allowing the internment and deportation of Japanese, German, and Italian Americans during WWII after the Pearl Harbor attacks
Surveillance systems are far more advanced now than then, so the government’s ability to find people is much greater than it’s ever been in the history of the country
ICE will likely start with the “easiest” targets and round up anyone nearby using “collateral arrests” by targeting individuals and then when they show up to arrest that person, forcing everyone nearby to show papers, and arresting anyone undocumented
1.3 million have already been through court systems and ordered to be deported, but are still in the US—these will be some of the easiest to target and remove
The “first order” of deportation in the past has been prioritized toward people with criminal records, but in the Trump Admin’s first term they abandoned this practice in favor of making everyone a priority—which means many more people without criminal records are likely to be targeted without just focusing on the criminals
ICE has never had a system to go out into the community and find people who aren’t already in the state, local, and federal law enforcement database: National Criminal Information Center (NCIC)
If they want to reach their goal of deporting 11 million people, it’s unlikely that using these target-based methods (even through collateral arrests) will yield enough results, which means they’ll need to expand the net
What can we do to exploit areas of friction for the government during deportation?
Deportations are bilateral, meaning the country receiving the deportations must agree to take them. Countries can refuse to accept people the US is sending, for example Venezuela which has refused to participate due to sanctions from the US
Mexico has more power because of the agreements made with the Biden Admin to accept more deportations from other countries—if they decide to be oppositional toward the Trump Admin, this could slow deportations
Private prisons are going to be used as detainment/concentration camps, and early ICE raids will be highly publicized in an effort to frighten people and force them to self-deport
Blue states (or blue communities in red states) can organize locally to prevent hosting ICE—this has been successful in states like New York
Accompaniment programs have been successful in organizing communities to protest against ICE by rallying local leaders to support people being targeted by deportation, leading to cases of deferred action
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
1.5 million undocumented immigrants with TPS or DACA are vulnerable to losing status, jobs, protection against deportation
Last time, DACA recipients were given 1 final renewal before deportation, but it remains to be seen whether this will happen again
The Council brings together problem solvers and employs four coordinated approaches to advance change—litigation, research, legislative and administrative advocacy, and communications.
The Immigration Justice Campaign – an initiative between the American Immigration Council, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and the American Immigrant Representation Project – seeks to change the playing field by preparing lawyers to be cutting-edge defenders of and advocates for immigrants facing deportation.
In Progress
📗 Strange Harvest: Broken Dome
Part I: Coalescent Acts of Desperation
❗ Upcoming:
🎁 Bonus Content:
Can you guess these yet-to-be-guessed quotes? 💬
It’s time for even more hints edition
💌#4: "If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from." ☀🏜
Spoken by a young Mark in a sandy, sandy desert
These are not the hints you’re looking for 👋
💌#5: 😎 "Kaneda! What do you see?!" 🌞
Pre-Captain-America-Chris-Evans tries to blow up the Sun… in a good way
Pre-Peaky-Blinders-Cillian-Murphy plays a mopey physicist aboard the Icarus II
💌#7: 🃏➡ "A Kansas City Shuffle is when everybody looks right, you go left." ⬅🃏
Why’s he called Mr. Goodcat?
Willis, Hartnett, Liu
💌#9: "Sometimes, you have to roll a hard six." 🦇L⭐
Series has a great start and a terrible ending, I will fight you
A former schoolteacher becomes President of what’s left of humanity
💌#11: "I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies." 🥛
You’ll always be Bilbo to me, Ash
I think I already used this movie but it’s fine… mostly
Best,
James Hanlon
12/1/2024
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