Fox in the Outhouse: Invasion, Immigration & Inflation

The “I's” have it today with this little interstitial interrogatory investigating invasion, immigration and inflation, along with an introduction of an inflammatory imbecile. For the uninitiated to the ways of the Unf*ckers, these Quickies allow us to weigh in on more current trends in between our larger Unf*ckings. In a way, it allows us to take what we’ve learned from prior episodes and apply it to the daily barrage of propaganda and media narratives. Oh, and we always do them in threes, because that’s my lucky number.

Invasion

We begin today with our first “i” for invasion. Now, this Quickie not only ties in some prior lessons, but helps tee up a couple of future episodes as well, particularly immigration and our fossil fuel dependency. For today, I landed on a quick take look at Fox News because I was recently transported through a wormhole into an alternate reality entirely designed by Rupert Murdoch and the braintrust at Fox News and had the strangest dream…

99:  Oop. We’re losing him.

MANNY: Quick translation. Max went to Florida.

It was magisterial. Once I went through the portal…

MANNY: LaGuardia Airport…

I landed in a majestic world where the virus doesn’t exist.

99: Meaning no one was wearing a mask.

Everyone was rooting for someone named Brandon, and Fox News was playing on every television. 

MANNY: Ah. Max was visiting family.

And what to my dream state self did appear but a vision from none other than Fucker Carlson talking about war in Ukraine:

“So this country is now closer to a legitimate war than we have been in decades. And to be clear, we’re talking about an actual war, not a protracted series of airstrikes against some impoverished dirt patch they’re telling you is an ‘existential threat to the nation.’”

MANNY: Hold up, hold up. I must be in your fever dream with you. Is this motherfucker talking about NOT going to war?

Indeed he is, Manny. But wait. It gets better. Look who he blames for getting us into war:

“The core problem is that in America, elected officials no longer decide when we go to war as in, say, a democracy. Instead, bureaucrats, generals and defense contractors make those decisions, sometimes unilaterally.”

99: I’m with Manny. A bit confused here. Did Fucker Carlson just call out the private war machine?

He did. And then doubles down on it:

“So, the President of the United States is not allowed to talk in public about Russia—he’s admitted that today. He might say something that averts war. So instead, the same people who’ve lost the last five wars get to speak for him. Do you feel safer?”

MANNY: Is this you doing an impression of Fucker Carlson?

No. It’s not. And check this out. He then goes after private contractor ties with sitting U.S. officials and talks about how the U.S. public has no appetite for this bullshit: 

“Polls show that most Americans are completely opposed to fighting Russia over Ukraine, because they’re not demented. But do you know who’s very much in favor of it? Well, defense contractors, including Pentagon Chief Lloyd Austin’s former employer, Raytheon. For defense contractors, war means massive profits, by definition. In just the last few years, the U.S. has spent more than $2 billion in military aid to this nation called Ukraine [that] most people couldn’t identify on a map. Just the other day, the administration announced $200 million more. So the Ukrainians love this. Obviously. This is the whole reason they once employed Joe Biden’s otherwise unemployable son.”

MANNY: Okay. I give up. What are we doing here?

Proving a point from the last two episodes and offering a teachable moment. There is a lesson here. 

99:  That a broken clock is right twice a day?

MANNY: Even a blind squirrel finds a nut.

99:  Leave the animals out of this.

MANNY: Not everything is about veganism, 99.

Knock it off. There are three lessons here, my beloved co-conspirators, Unf*ckers, Subf*ckers, Eurof*ckers, Down Under F*ckers, UnCanuckers, Pitch/Pak/BotL and SWAJf*ckers:

1. For your propaganda machine to be accepted, you must include elements of straight talk and truth to keep friends and enemies alike off balance, and…

2. This should strike a chord after our libertarian episodes. What Fucker is proffering here is very much in line with minarchist and paleolibertarian thinking.

Let’s roll back the tape to part one of “Libertarians are Exhausting” to review these two forms of libertarianism.

Minarchism

Like anarcho-capitalists and libertarian socialists, minarchists believe that most functions currently served by the government should be served by smaller, non-government groups. At the same time, however, they believe that a government is still needed to serve a few collective needs, such as military defense. I feel like most of the younger libertarian voices that you hear on college campuses or screaming at people on call in shows can be classified as minarchists. This one is kind of weird, though, because they believe in creatures that have the head of a bull and the body of a man.

Paleolibertarianism

Paleolibertarians differ from neo-libertarians in that they are isolationists who do not believe that the United States should become entangled in international affairs. They also tend to be suspicious of international coalitions such as the United Nations, liberal immigration policies, and other potential threats to cultural stability. The paleo comes from their practice of eating the flesh of social Democrats.

Point being, this is very much on brand, not only for certain strains of libertarianism, but also for Carlson. Earlier in his career, he joined the chorus of warmongers, but over the past several years he’s actually been a vocal critic of foreign interventions. But the larger point here is lesson number three, which is that this kind of straight talk helps make the other bullshit sound reasonable because it’s coming from the same trusted source. A lesson as old as time which teaches us that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

IMMIGRATION

I should mention, Unf*ckers, that Fucker’s stance on war does create a problem for the brass at Fox News and the Republican Party. He’s that influential. So I’m not so obtuse as to refrain from giving some credit where it’s due here. By the same token, and with the paleolibertarian head fake out of the way, here’s the medicine after the sugar:

“You’ve got to ask yourself, as you watch the historic tragedy that is Joe Biden’s immigration policy, ‘what’s the point of this?’ Nothing about it is an accident, obviously, it’s intentional. Joe Biden did it on purpose. Why? Why would a president do this to his own country? No sane first world nation opens its borders to the world, promising the poorest people on the planet that they can have endless free taxpayer-funded services if they show up and break your laws. That’s not just stupid, it’s suicidal.”

Fucker has been pushing something called the Great Replacement Theory, whereby Democrats want to replace white Americans with brown immigrants, and he’s done it so often that it stuck. The big lie here being that people are streaming across the border to somehow obtain endless charitable government services, which no one who enters the country illegally is obviously entitled to receive. This narrative is pervasive on Fox and other right wing media outlets, as you can hear in this clip on Maria Blow-a-hardo’s show:

Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla.: “We are in an invasion at this point here on our southwest border. And this administration is doing nothing to curb this.”

 

Maria Bartiromo: “This is such an extraordinary situation. I mean, you just mentioned the Remain in Mexico—so the administration enrolled 267 illegal migrants in the Remain in Mexico program in December. The Trump-era program was abolished as soon as President Biden took office, then we had to hear from a federal judge to rule that it was unlawfully abandoned; the judge ordered the administration to restart it. Congresswoman, you know this, we all know this.

 

“They were very slow to actually put it in place, and I said on the air many times that my sources at the border were telling me, ‘They’re not going to reinstitute Remain in Mexico, I’ll believe it when I see it.’ And now we see that they are slow-walking this. 267 people sent back to Remain in Mexico—compare that to the two million people that were apprehended all last year, and the 650,000 gotaways that were seen on surveillance cameras. How could they actually tell us that they’re reinstituting Remain in Mexico when it was only 267 people?”

For a once reputable business reporter, Blow-a-hardo is having some difficulty with numbers here, but she’s certainly on message. Two million apprehended just last year and 650,000 “gotaways.” This term “gotaways” has entered the lexicon to mean those who got away from border patrol. Aside from being a stupidly lazy term, it’s also nearly impossible to predict this figure, but okay. Regardless, let’s dig into the immigration numbers a bit to properly explain what’s going on here, because Fox has continued to run with the narrative of an out-of-control border from day one of the Biden Administration, and there’s frustratingly little counter-narrative available.

First off, the number of those “apprehended” last year—meaning turned away from all entry points into the United States—was 1.5 million, according to federal officials, not two million. Still a pretty big number, right? But they’re not all trying to sneak across the southern border. Most of them knock and are turned away like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Border officials also point out that it’s impossible to determine how many attempts were made by the same asylum and immigration seekers, so the absolute number is far less than this.

What anti-immigration pundits should be celebrating is the fact that these people were denied entry, which indicates that the system is working. So let’s dispense with Blow-a-hardo’s fabricated two million number, the inflated 1.5 million figure that doesn’t account for multiple attempts by the same people, and focus on the so-called gotaways and those who entered with our knowledge and overstayed.

It’s unclear where the 650,000 number comes from, but we do have actual data from the Census Bureau that teamed up with other agencies due to the pandemic to actually obtain one of the most realistic counts in recent years. James Risen of The Intercept recently reported that according to the joint agencies:

“Net international migration (NIM) into the United States increased by just 247,000 people in 2021, the lowest annual level for any year since at least 2010. That’s about half the number of people who came into the country between 2019 and 2020, during the Trump administration, when net international migration totaled 477,000. The 2021 figure was also far below the 1,049,000 who came into the U.S. between 2015 and 2016, the highest level for any year in that decade.

In terms of direct impact on individual states, the report from the Census Bureau stated that, “Florida, Texas, New York, California, and Massachusetts typically gain the most migrants from abroad and comprise about half of NIM for the nation most years,” and that, “All five of these states saw decreases in NIM between 2015 and 2021, including a nearly 50% drop from 2020 to 2021.” California had the biggest drop “from 148,000 in 2015 to 15,000 in 2021.”

So why such a huge disconnect? It seems implausible that Fox or anyone following this would get the numbers so incredibly wrong. Well, yes and no. True, they’re playing fast and loose by rounding up preposterously and leaving out important details like multiple attempts by the same people. But they’re able to paint a picture of a crisis by overexposing the same pictures of hot spots on the border where true illegal attempts are being made and showing them over and over with an overlay of a really tenuous narrative.

What’s missing is one key ingredient that we’ll cover in more detail in our immigration episode this year, and that’s the concept of net migration. I alluded to it before, and it’s critical to understand, so let’s do the math and unpack the equation that really matters in the immigration discussion:

Foreign-Born Immigration - Foreign-Born Emigration + Net Puerto Rican Migration + Net Native-Born Immigrants = Net International Migration.

So, one by one now:

• Foreign-Born immigration is just what it says. The number of people that gained entry to the country from foreign nations. Legally, illegally, on work visas, student visas, temporary agriculture visas, etc.

• Foreign-Born Emigration is the outflow; the number of people from those same categories who left the United States. Most of them probably saying “what the fuck was that?”

• Net Puerto Rican Migration is just that. The total increase or decrease to the Puerto Rican population.

• Net Native-Born immigrants. Babies born to immigrants in the United States.

Add them all up, and you get Net International Migration (NIM).

So in raw, real, practical terms we’re talking about 247,000 people. Or .06% of the total U.S. population. I understand that even one immigrant into the United States is simply too much for some people to handle, so let’s switch gears and do our thing to put this into economic terms.

Let’s move over to the labor shortage narrative. In the audio version of this essay, we played a montage of Fox News clips with hosts talking about Americans being lazy (Mike Rowe), Larry Kudlow talking about the virtue of work and not taking handouts, David Asman blaming vaccine mandates and Fucker with the lazy claim of people being paid more to stay home.

All of these chuckleheads out there are looking for answers while trying to prop up false narratives about the economy and things like immigration.

Okay. Here’s the truth. Turns out 2021 saw the lowest population growth ever recorded in the United States. Let me repeat that: the lowest ever recorded. Lots of people died in this thing called a pandemic. And we had a lot fewer immigrants due to extremely low migration and immigration numbers, leaving low wage jobs more vacant. Oh, and our economy has grown. Like a lot. 6.3% in the first quarter. 6.7% in the second. And 2.3% in the third. The numbers for the fourth quarter came out just the other day, landing at 1.7%, which equated to a total annualized growth rate of 5.7%, the largest expansion of our economy since 1984.

Then there’s the higher end of the spectrum, beyond low wage jobs, because low immigration doesn’t account for the total number of job openings. There’s still a gap. This one we can hang on the boomers, as 3.5 million American seniors decided to finally retire this past year. Maybe they figured that greeting fucklip maskless hillbillies at the Walmart entrance wasn’t worth catching a fucking deadly virus. Dunno. So just over 50% of those who decided not to return are seniors, the only demographic to increase its participation rate after the Great Recession because people have to work longer due to the imbalance and inequality of our system.

Total it up, and we have 1.5% below the participation rate prior to the Pandemic, and we’ll probably catch up in 2022.

In real numbers, we’re talking about 1.7 million non-senior Americans not returning to a workforce of 162 million people. So that’s…162 million…the cosign of 1.7 million…a factor of 12 donuts…multiplied by the folds in Mitch McConnell’s chin flap…and you get…1%.

1% of the workforce has yet to return to accept your shitty fucking menial low wage job.

Stop. Blaming. Immigrants.

INFLATION

Let’s head back over to Fox to hear from Larry Kudlow, conservative commentator and former Trump appointee, to introduce our next “i” subject: Inflation.

“So inflation is taxation without legislation…according to the great Nobel Prize winning Milton Friedman many years ago.”

Just a little reminder that while we’re obsessed with pissing on Uncle Dicknoggin’s grave, it’s not without reason. He still inspires asshats the world over to this day. Anyway, here’s talking penis Stephen Miller talking about every crisis Biden has created:

“The reality problem is an inflation crisis, an energy crisis, a jobs crisis, an Afghanistan crisis, a COVID crisis, and a southern border crisis and now a supply chain crisis.”

The segment he appeared on was supposed to just be about inflation, but this animated ghoul decided to conflate every issue under the sun with rising inflation. We’ll zero in on it a bit more than Penis Miller and keep it on track.

Remember back to our labor union episode when we talked about the concept of “taking price?” That was the artful way that the Kellogg’s CEO described their record profits. They “took price.” Well, Kellogg’s wasn’t the only one to do so.

A Substack piece by Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, in which he dissects the inputs of real inflation, recently made the rounds in the media. Stoller was previously a senior policy advisor and budget analyst to the Senate Budget Committee and worked on policies like Dodd-Frank for the House prior to that.

Stoller uses GDP to analyze the real inflation rate and calculated that the impact of inflation on the average American was around $4,700 in 2021. Then he benchmarked that against the increase in profits in corporate America to say:

“Taking all of this together, it means that increased profits from corporate America comprise 44.7% of the inflationary increase in costs. That means corporate profits alone are absorbing a 3% inflation rate on all goods and services in America (44.7% of 6.8% annual inflation), with all other factors causing the remaining 3.8%, for a total inflation rate of 6.8%. In other words, had corporate America kept the same average annual level of profits in 2021 as it did from 2012–2019 and passed on today’s excess to consumers, the inflation rate would be 3.8%, not 6.8%.”

Considering the normal inflation target of the Federal Reserve is typically around 2%, 3.8% inflation from non-corporate profit taking sounds a little more tame. Stoller notes that Europe and Japan, for example, saw lower inflation, as their corporations didn’t rake consumers over the coals in the same way corporate America did. As Stoller concludes:

“If you take the pre-existing inflation rate in 2019 of 1.8% and back that out of the numbers, then it turns out that 60% of the increase in inflation is going to corporate profits.”

So, to be clear on the math, what Stoller is demonstrating is that 1.8% inflation already existed and corporations took 3% right to their bottom lines, leaving the real impact of government spending—if that’s where you want to lay the blame—at around 2%. All told, then, that means corporate profits were responsible for 60% of the total in real terms.

Before we move on, we should be clear about the components of inflation because you’ll hear a few different things bandied about in the media. There’s the traditional CPI, which is the Consumer Price Index that some economists and media outlets prefer to report. The downside of CPI when you’re trying to measure inflation is that it includes the volatility of items like gasoline prices, which can swing wildly. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an important part of the equation, because so many Americans are reliant upon gas for transportation and heating. CPI is also more narrow, because it only accounts for prices in urban areas.

The figure that most economists prefer to get a true sense of things on the ground is the PCE, or Personal Consumption Expenditures. PCE also has derivatives that can exclude food prices to strictly examine services like financial services, landscapers and hairdressers, durable goods like vehicles, appliances, furniture and non-durable goods like groceries, personal care products and clothing. These are the areas that are more likely to be affected by supply chain issues, which do exist, as we’ve covered before. But, again, as we mentioned in our labor episode, the supply chain issues didn’t affect a large swath of consumer products companies like Kellogg’s who simply “took price” and blamed it on supply chain issues they never really had.

So did prices for everything increase? Yes. Taking the corporate greed piece out of the equation, which is 60% of that number and didn’t need to happen, you’re looking at key pocketbook areas like vehicles, furniture and home improvement items that absolutely felt the effects of the supply chain shocks. And you’re looking at food, especially imported food, and gasoline. Pain at the gas pump is a very real thing for most Americans.

Now I know that our former President likes to promote that we hit seven dollars at the pump but—and I know this is going to come as a shock to many of you—that’s a lie.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the average price at the pump as of this writing is $3.23. U.S. gasoline futures are trending above $2.50 per gallon, which is what pushes the core price at the pump and is the highest it’s been since 2014, because of supply concerns over the situation in Ukraine, primarily. The jump in prices from the summer months in 2021 until now is a reflection of constricted supply from OPEC and other oil producing countries including…

The United States.

Let’s head back over to Fox, where they ask former Bush advisor Karl Rove about the reasons behind high gas prices:

“Gas prices are up 61% since the time he took office. Part of it is because of the overhang of the pandemic, but the other part of it is the anti-energy actions this administration has taken. Putting a halt on new leasing, taking ANWAR off the table, uh, er, saying they, uh, er, they were, uh, going to have new taxes and regulations. And not only that, but this whole thing is a kabuki!”

ANWAR, regulations, taxes…Rove is calling bullshit and says the whole thing is Bukkake.

MANNY: Kabuki

Whatever.

MANNY: No, not whatever. This is important. Kabuki. Kah-Boo-Kee.

Kabuki. Fine. But the reason it’s not Kabuki is simple supply and demand. OPEC has actually cut supply from a high of 33 million barrels per day pre-pandemic to a low of 24 million this summer. Now it’s back up to 28 million, but that is still constricted. The global supply follows suit from 83 million pre-pandemic to a low of 70 million this summer to around 77 million today. The U.S. hit a high of 13 million and is around 11.6 million today. Nothing to do with ANWAR, nothing to do with policy, regulations or taxes. Just supply and demand and the impact on pricing because oil producers all over the world are trying to increase their profits and build a floor under their commodity.

If nothing else, this is a great primer on our upcoming oil episode, and I’m excited for that one.

Lastly, before we close out, I want to welcome the next generation of asshat to the Fox primetime schedule. Longtime dickbag and smarmy Bill O’Reilly wannabe, Jesse Watters has his own big boy show, and I have to say, it looks pretty promising. Watters is known for his super douchey “man on the street” interviews and has been a consistent presence over the years, and he made it through the Scientology-like gauntlet at Fox to turn him into a sarcastic next-gen alien mouth breather. Here’s the signoff of his show to demonstrate that he can rattle off all of the Fox talking points in one sentence without concerning himself with details or even having a point:

“So this is the lesson. Whatever the corporate media tells you, it’s probably just a sales pitch for a product they’re making money from on the back end. I think you know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you? China. Pfizer. Facebook. Ukraine. Open borders. You follow the money and work back from there.”

I have no fucking idea what any of this means, but welcome to primetime Watters.

In the coming months, we’re going to finally tackle some Down Under F*ckery. Thanks to my man and avid listener Rafe-Raf, I’ve got enough research to earn my PhD in Aussie politics. We’re also going to tackle big ticket items like oil and gas, immigration, Hollywood and politics (with some support from Unf*cker Krin) plus a whole bunch more. We’ll keep livening things up with current events in our Quickies, and 99 and I are still toying with another quick take format to add some additional content to the feed. We’re just making sure we can handle the commitment, do it top notch and ensure that the core episodes are our priority.

We’re also going to be bringing in new Pod Love recommendations, as we connect with other creators that we admire in the podasphere, and you know they’ll always be outstanding recommendations like Pitchfork Economics, Straight White American Jesus and David Pakman. All of this reminds me to remind you to continue supporting the show that took a chance on us and got us to where we are today: Best of the Left. Please be sure to support their show, if you’re not already a member, because Jay! has been at the center of the leftist podcast movement since the beginning.

Before we head out, I want to reflect briefly on where we are with UNFTR listeners. I feel like in the past couple of months we’ve really found our groove and our voice, and Unf*ckers have responded in a way that humbles us. There’s a special combination of things happening right now that I didn’t fully anticipate. The first is the nature of discovery. As a writer, my best days are when I wind up in a totally different place than where I started or assumed I would end. This usually only happens when you’re really in a groove and seriously dialed in. I’ve experienced this a couple of times in my writing career, but never to such an extent as right now.

That’s the power of research and reflection. The reason propaganda is so effective is because of what we outlined earlier in this Quickie. Messaging has to be sensible and tangible enough to make the delivery of it feel right. Then you can begin to slip bullshit through the back door and into the subconscious. It’s why OAN just flamed out. It was too brash. Too fake. Too much. It’s why Fox reigns supreme. And because most of our media is consumed passively and people simply don’t have time to do the work, there’s a tendency to lock in on certain outlets and trust that they’re doing it the right way.

That’s why we rely so much on sourcing and take great pains to do the research and do the work. You need to know and trust that I’m thinking hard about this shit and making connections. And what has the writer in me so jubilant is exactly that. The synapses are firing. The connections are real. And some really powerful themes are emerging from the work we’re doing. But there’s another part of the equation that is just as powerful, and that’s the connection to the audience.

Your comments and suggestions range from funny to brilliant. Not a week goes by where I don’t sit back and say, “holy fuck.” I push because you push. 99 and Manny eat, sleep and breathe this with me because they know we’re onto something special. Because of you. Because of your support. Our good buddy Cam J, who recently became a member, reached out to say he was shocked that we only had 99 members, which we mentioned last week because of 99, of course. I was embarrassed for a second when I read that because I realized how podunk that probably made us sound but honestly, for us, we are blown away that 99 people—and it’s a few more now, obviously—would support us on a monthly basis given the battle for your wallets and attention. Every dollar makes a huge difference in offsetting the costs of production, and we’re grateful for every new member, every order of coffee and every message that comes our way. But the real power in this community is the heart. The desire to grow and learn. And to change the world. Like Nettie from Outagamie fighting the powers that be on the street corner. That kind of ‘change the world’ mindset is pervasive in this community, and I’m so happy that we’ve found one another.

Between the beauty and power of discovery through writing, and the connection between our team and the audience, my heart is full. Thank you again for coming on this journey with us.

Here endeth the heartfelt thanks.