Venting:
A con job (short for “confidence”) is an agreement between by a person or group to another person or group. One intends to deprive the other of their liberties or possessions by way of deception. The former is what’s called the mark (that's the chump, the sucker) and the latter is the con artist(s).
The way a con plays out depends on which of the mark’s emotional buttons can be pressed to most quickly make a chump out of them. When a slick-haired politician like Tom Graves says, “things are going to get better for you and your family — but first, you have to sign this $1.5 trillion check to your boss’s boss,” that was a con. It was a bad con and you should have known better, but it was a con. You were the mark.
When a corporatist politician campaigning for re-election says, “vote for me and I’ll protect the ACA provisions on pre-existing conditions,” WHILE they simultaneously waging war in the courts to gut the ACA of those very protections, that was a con. It was a bad con and you should have known better, but it was still a con. It was a con because you confided in them and you believed them despite all evidence to the contrary. You were the mark. Now they’re doing the same thing to the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security they swore so confidently to protect. You'll be the mark when that happens, too.
Obviously, the best con is one where the mark never learns they’ve been had. The best mark is a mark that enjoys being conned. This is when marks are the most compliant —and the most profitable.
Naturally, racism is very good for con jobs.
The seasoned con artist (one that wields enough political influence to write their con into law) knows they can play on a person’s racism like strings on a puppet. They just have to say things just right at exactly the right time. They just have to play political theater and play it well until they make their move.
One very prominent con artist, the private prison industry, along with all their allies, have developed a very successful rendition of an age-old confidence job that deals directly with America’s hatred towards brown people.
Through political race baiting in state assemblies, through the racist rhetoric of the men and women in Congress, and through conservative allies in both mainstream and independent media, they ignite racial tensions. They fan the flames gradually. When the mass of men has become sufficiently rabid, the con is halfway complete. Their political operatives then enact harsh and uncompromising anti-immigration policies that are as lucrative to the private prison industry as they are cruel to the children they traumatize.
The taxpayer burden associated with this kind of cruelty is astronomical. The adult workers (illegal aliens if you like) who were previously paying in excess of $7 billion into Social Security through payroll tax — despite never being eligible for Social Security themselves — now live in subhuman conditions and are forced to do hard labor in GEO and CoreCivic prisons. Never mind the damage done to agrarian economies that rely on them to do the jobs you wouldn't.
But now what do with the children that were torn away from their families? Make a profit of course. Some are taken to literal baby prisons. Some are taken to “tent cities” which is really just a nice way of saying “concentration camp.” The cost for one of these traumatized kids to have a bed in ICE’s tent city is $775 per night. That’s $279,000 per year. How many kids are there? How long do you think they'll be here?
Take a look at what has just happened here.
They got you all riled up. It started with all that talk about MS-13. Then they started talking about a border wall. Then they started separating families. Then they threw kids in cages. Then it was okay because "Obama did it first." Then Brian Kemp was going to "round up criminal illegals" in the back of his pickup truck. Then they started scaring you about a migrant caravan around election time. Then they sent the troops to the border to try and look useful. Then they started gassing mothers while they were holding their babies. And you absolutely loved it. But it was still a con, and it did cost you something.
First, it cost you your human decency. You paid that price when you approved of traumatizing small children by ripping them away from their parents and throwing them in cages. You paid that price when you approved of a child thirsting to death in ICE custody.
The second price you paid was when your Social Security was inadvertently cut after you had one of the program’s streams of revenue (that always paid a lot into it but never took a penny out) locked up.
The third cost to you is that now, your tax base is as good as cut and you helped cut it. You now must pick up the exorbitant detainment costs associated with these policies. A lot of the people who buy the exact same goods and pay the exact same sales tax as you are now incarcerated. That amounts to a net loss in tax revenue. Keep in mind, I’m just scratching the surface here. I didn’t even discuss what private prison contracts with ICE are costing taxpayers.
So, I’ve got to ask, are you safer now? Do you FEEL safer? Did you finally get a better job? The one the immigrant took from you? Are things the way they used to be? Have you returned to the good ol’ days? Did your taxes go down? DId we save money now that they're not "leaching off" the welfare system? Are you FINALLY swimming in money just the way you knew you would be if all those damn immigrants were gone? Nope.
But you did get something.
You got to see what you considered to be, “progress.” You got to see the people you hate most treated with cruelty. You also got to taut law and order so you could be at peace with the awful things you saw happening on the television. I know it felt like a win, but you never looked at the price tag, you dummy. Just because your soul is gone doesn't mean everyone else is. And now, Mr. Constitutional-Fiscal-Conservative, you've helped cut your own Social Security and tore your own tax base a new one. And you did it by assaulting the constitutional rights of others.
That’s why you and those like you are easy marks.
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