By SJ
Otto
Is it really that
surprising that President Donald Trump referred to Haiti and African nations as
"shithole countries" during a meeting with a bipartisan group of
senators at the White House?
The comment has been
reported by a Democratic aide briefed on Thursday's meeting, according to NBC
News.
It is no surprise that many
politicians this week have labelled Trump a racist. And some people seemed
shocked to hear our president use profanity.
I am not shocked at the
profanity. I really don't care and I agree it is they way a lot of common
people talk. After a year of Trump being in office it is no real surprise to
find he is a racist. And as far as calling Haiti and African nations as
"shitholes" he is partially right. Some of those nations are bad
places to live.
As for the people of Norway not
wanting to come here, Trump is pretty dumb if he can't figure that one out. Norway is a developed
European nation. It has a well developed economy. According to National
Public Radio:
"From
1870 to 1910 a quarter of Norway 's
working-age population emigrated, mostly to the United States . You read that right
— one-fourth of its workers left the country.
Back
then Norway
was quite poor. Wages were less than a third of what they were in the United States .
And the wave of emigration out of the country quickly benefited those who
remained. That's because it reduced the supply of workers in Norway , so
those left behind could demand higher wages. And this helped narrow Norway 's wage gap with the U.S. by 25 percent over that same 40-year
period, putting Norway
on the path toward its status today as one of world's most prosperous nations.
Those
are the findings of a paper published in European Review of Economic History
back in 1997 by two economists. It's considered a seminal work because the
authors — Alan Taylor of the University of California Davis and Jeffrey
Williamson — then of Harvard University, now professor emeritus
at the University of Wisconsin, Madison — combed through paper archives to
piece together the first truly comprehensive picture of wage differentials
across European countries and the United States during that time.....
.....Then
in 2008 a wealth of new data became available about Norway
that added yet another twist to the picture: It turns out that the immigrants
that Norway sent to the U.S. during
that great migration wave of the 1870s were its poorest and least educated
citizens. Researchers were able to determine this thanks to newly digitized
census data from Norway .
(Other European countries have embarked on similar efforts but Norway , with
only around 2 million residents in its early census data, finished the task first.
That has made Norway
the go-to nation for researchers of historical economics.)"
There
is a simple reality that Trump overlooks. European countries, such as Norway , don't
have so much deep poverty. A lot of people in Norway have jobs. One big factor a
lot of Republicans overlook are that most European countries have free or cheap
health care. People
in Norway pay almost nothing for their health care. So why do people with
decent jobs, living in a first world country with a developed economy similar
to the US —and
most of all—Mostly free health care want to come here? To put this in simple
terms Norway
is not a shithole of a country.
But
the "shithole" countries are a different story. Most nations in
Africa and Haiti
are underdeveloped. Many lack resources. Many have had famine and other natural
disasters. Wages in those nations are often way below wages in the US . Governments
are usually corrupt, with lousy human rights records. There is usually a wide divide
between the poor workers and the rich upper classes.
Probably
the best example of this is Yemen .
Yemen is not an industrialised nation as
is Norway .
Yemen
as of 2013 had a GDP (ppp) of US $61.63 billion, with an income per capita
of $2,500.The unemployment rate as of 2003 was 35 percent. Simple logic
suggests that people prefer to live in a nation that has a developed economy, adequate
jobs and they probably like living in a nation where they can afford health
care.
One
thing that Trump is not talking much about is that the US is presently sending troops to Africa to interfere in those nation's political affairs.
To put things in plain easy to understand English, the US is planning to import the same kind of
imperialist intervention it has used in the last 10 years in the Middle East .
Until
the Soviet Union fell, Yemen
had a Marxist Government in its Southern half and a Western style republic in the North.
After the Soviet Union fell North and South
agreed to unite into one country. Then the northern government attacked the
Southern Marxist army and wiped them out. As with many African countries there
is presently an Islamic faction that resemble ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ) in some
ways, called the Houthis (الحوثيون). The US ,
has been using Saudi Arabia ,
one of the most repressive regimes in the world, as a proxy army to attack the
Houthis. Saudi Arabia attacked them with aircraft and
with that action that country and the US have deepened involvement in
that countries internal struggles. So not only is Yemen a poor country, it is now war
torn nation.
Most people don't like living in countries at
war since a lot of innocent bystanders get killed. Who wants to live in a
country where they can get killed on any day without any warning?
While I don't really care if the president uses
profane language and I agree people want to come here from "shithole
countries" the one thing that is apparent is that our president is just
not that smart. The answers to his questions are obvious. Many of us already
now that Trump is a racist. The problem is he is also an idiot and he is unfit
to be president. This latest incident is just one more piece of evidence that
he is unfit for the office.
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