I don’t understand why the smart people and educators just don’t give them the horrors they’re wanting and expecting.
power always seems to instill a firm belief in one’s own immortality.
I mean, I need a job, and I’d love to be a mole while I’m at it.
the other can disappear tomorrow and nothing would change
Not true. People would be living in less fear, and the world would be a far better place.
I’ve heard ICE described as a militia of the unemployed mobilized to declare war on the working class
Your comment made me think of the Zimbardo prison experiment, and how there seem to be some similarities between that experiment and what is happening in US with all this ICE mess.
What have y’all been reading lately?
I just finished The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which I thought was an incredible read. I would recommend anarchists and communists (and really everyone) read it for a pre-historic and historic view of social organization and freedom. What I thought was one of the more interesting concepts they developed was that in pre-contact North America, individuals had three essential freedoms that we have either lost or had greatly diminished: the right of movement, the right to refuse orders, and the right to create new social realities. (I’m slightly paraphrasing their exact language here, already returned the book to the library) They also go pretty deeply into the impact Indigenous North American societies had on European Enlightenment thought. If any of that interests you, I highly recommend it.
I also just finished The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which is much shorter but a very lovely examination of gift economies and viewing nature as a gift economy. Solarpunk people, this is probably up your alley.
Graeber is fantastic. Loved “Debt: the First 5000 years”
I was really bummed to find out he died of complications related to COVID in 2020!
Hell yeah I also recently finished the Dawn of Everything and it really blew my mind. Highly seconding it.
The other can disappear tomorrow and nothing would change
Not true. If you get rid of jobs that are actively making the world worse, things will almost certainly get better, at least in the short term.
The wealthy aristocracy that controls both parties needs a paramilitary police force in the streets to quell the inevitable uprisings that will occur once enough Americans realize that the aristocracy has dispensed with economic populism and constitutional order
Not that I disagree with the point generally, but there is a difference of scale here.
There are around 22k ICE agents. At 150k, that’s 3.3b for the first year, and then 2.2b in following years.
There are around 4m teachers in the US. To raise them all from 55k to the 100k that ICE agents make (ignoring the hiring bonus) would cost 180b/yr. Two orders of magnitude greater.
I’m not saying it’s not worth it. I’m also not saying that ICE agents are good. I’m also not saying this disparity is justified.
I’m simply saying that the analogy, as given, implies that if we had the money to pay ICE agents 100k+bonuses, then we should have just paid the teachers that much instead. But that’s not how the math works. And just because the argument feels good emotionally doesn’t mean it’s accurate. And the truth shouldn’t need a lie to drive it forward. There are plenty of good, factual arguments to make, and this isn’t one of them.
To be fair, there are plenty other jobs thst could be cut, like CEO of Amazon
While I’m sure there’s a not-insignificant amount of government grants that go towards CEO pay… they’re not paid directly by the government. That’s an even worse comparison.
A failure to tax them is one remove away from direct payment.
Note that the CEO’s also don’t go very far for teacher pay. It looks like a few hundred CEO’s cut would raise teachers pay by ~$100/month. Same mistake: 4 million is a big number to divide by.
How about all the money made by health insurance companies that shouldn’t exist? That’d go a long way toward funding education.
If we believe the internet, all of that is funneled to the CEOs, and so the previous post applies?
(Which seems absurd to me, but maybe the bills are rare enough that this makes sense? Does anybody have data on how big that figure is vs actual cost of the buildings+labor+materials? We could compare to other countries, but then I think we’re seeing a difference in infrastructure, social and physical, more than malfeasance.)
Every corporate CEO should be cut… with a guillotine
There are around 22k ICE agents.
They increased payroll by 120% in the last year alone. This does not include private contracts for construction and maintenance of new detainment facilities, coming out of the $45B earmarked by Congress last year.
There are around 4m teachers in the US. To raise them all from 55k to the 100k that ICE agents make (ignoring the hiring bonus) would cost 180b/yr.
$45B -> $180B is not two orders of magnitude.
if we had the money to pay ICE agents 100k+bonuses, then we should have just paid the teachers that much instead
Pete Hegseth is currently asking Congress for an extra $200B in Pentagon spending, after increasing their budget $71B this year already.
We clearly don’t have a problem with finding more money.
We should use symmetric data where we can. We also have lots earmarked and moved around for education, it’s just a much bigger project. The cost comparison for signing bonus of ICE vs educators was apples to apples, and what was literally suggested in OP. Make another post with the honest comparison if you want that to be the standard. Feeds can be both informative and honest if we make them that way.
(Also, only a few thousand jobs are offered the signing bonus. It’s a last mile carrot to get people talking, which we seem to be gullible enough to upvote and spread. I’m not enjoying being an ICE recruiter.)
The cost comparison for signing bonus of ICE
It’s far more than just signing bonuses in the equation
This is true, but the scale goes both ways. For every dollar of public education you get $1+X out. This has been true for the vast majority of public education programs for at least the past half century. So public education is literally a good investment. I’ve never gone looking for data on ICE, but I’d bet good money that for every dollar and there’s a net loss.
In order for that argument to be valid, the country would have to be run as if it could see beyond the next financial quarter.
It is currently being run as if they are selling off parts of a stolen vehicle for scrap money, and maxing out all the cards they found inside.
Yeah, this is like the ‘1 billion is enough for to give everyone a million’ - an unfortunate bit of innumeracy. Directions good, but this is still misleading at best.
Also, unless I’m mistaken, teachers aren’t paid from the federal budget. I believe that the vast majority of public school funding, including teacher salaries, come from local taxes. In fact, I believe school funding is paid mostly from local property taxes. There isn’t one, national public school system that’s centrally funded. It’s decentralized and can vary significantly from one district to another.
Why let facts get in the way though
This is pretty much the same answer I give when people overrract about CEO pay. Sure they are overpaid dicks but their paycheck will often not amount to much when divided among all the employees.
My local taxes say y’all got shit tons of money. The schools just do an absolute shit job blowing it on other things besides walls and salaries for the teachers.
My state allows you to unenroll your student and take the money towards you home schooling, or charter schools, or other education which is a whole quagmire I’m not gonna get into
But it’s fucking mind blowing
They get $10,000/student/year and they’re cramming 32 students into a classroom.
$320,000 and the teacher makes $45,000 of it
Where the fuck is the rest of it going?
We’re getting subpar education - 39% below grade level in reading. 36% in maths. But I would be the bad guy if I choose to take this and “continue the cycle of destroying public education”.
I have no idea how that works, especially in the US but I imagine there are some big ugly corporations that somehow got licensing costs in there. Like licensed learning materials or methods and stuff like that.
All the bullshit deals with corpos that sell textbooks and videos and online learning programs and tablets. Don’t forget the portal subscription to crap like ClassDojo.
We’re in the “poor” school district. Nobody has a tablet. Textbooks are older than the original sin.
And everyday for at least an hour they jumble multiple grades in the auditorium and have them watch “Whatever is on PBS” today.
Is that where it’s going? Do they just forward it along to the nice schools?
You’re probably in a population to needing a school area that doesn’t play very nice for funding of any sort. That or school board is stealing money
The money is always there. I spent a decade at a job where they constantly told us there was no money for pay raises, constant pressure on employees to cut or manage costs, shitty schedules, etc.
Then there was a hiring boom. They were throwing money at recruits like crazy. Better pay. Huge signing bonuses that were more than I made in an entire year.
The money is always there. It’s for the shareholders. Not you.
You could sign up and gum up the fucking works from the inside.
JOIN THEM — please work to take them down from the inside, Mr. Snowden.
that’s how people disappear in the desert.
no thanks.
Well… you gotta be stealthy and subtle about it. Just use the N word a lot. You’ll be fine.
Downvote for advertising ICE?
If anybody’s tempted by those numbers, remember Trump’s track record of not paying people.
Are you under the impression he’s paying them out of his own pocket
Not at all. But that “$45,000 sign on bonus?” That was only for experienced, returning agents and only for a limited time (now passed). They didn’t say that anywhere in the advertisements. That proves they’re willing to lie to further their own ends, and nobody’s able to hold them accountable when they do.
The fact that the salary comes out of the taxpayers’ pockets also means it’s contingent on politics, and the democrats are likely to win in the midterms, and they’re starting to indicate that they may actually respond to public pressure and start pushing back.
You only have to look at all the homeless veterans and people killing themselves in VA waiting rooms to see how the empire “rewards” those who serve it. The McDonald’s employee who snitched on Luigi never got the reward they’d promised either.
Sign up, be so hated by the public that you have to hide your face, drag innocent people away to secret torture dungeons, get scammed out of your bonus, and yeah maybe you can get your 30 pieces of silver. But at that point, why not just sell crack? More trustworthy employers and less harmful to society.
Plenty of government people didn’t get the pardons/promotions/etc they were promised under Trump
It’s true. The ice employees have not been getting paid. And the bonus is a joke with so many impossible strings attached.
“Did we say ‘payable in USD’? Sorry, that was a typo. We meant ‘leprechaun gold’.”
Close! We actually meant TrumpUSD, an up and coming crypto coin that is expected to go up in value forever!
