What Americans Can Expect From Forthcoming Immigration Amnesty

The American people rejected a full-out amnesty in 2007.  Eight U.S. Senators conspired in secret meetings in the last week to bring back the exact same amnesty for an estimated 20 million illegal aliens now working and living in the United States.

What does it mean?  How will it affect America’s poor and the taxpayer?  What will be the final outcome?

First of all, we already import 100,000 legal, green card holding immigrants every 30 days. At the same time, we suffer 47.7 million Americans that cannot secure jobs while subsisting on food stamps.  Another 14 million Americans cannot secure a job while seven million suffer 20 hours a week jobs at low wages.

While Congress refuses to enforce immigration job laws on the books today, it pretends that it will enforce them after the new immigration law passes.  Congress will not enforce those laws because it won’t enforce the present laws.

Eight senators expected to endorse the new principles Monday are Democrats Charles Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Michael Bennet of Colorado; and Republicans John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marco Rubio of Florida and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press, the senators will call for accomplishing four goals:

1—Creating a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here, contingent upon securing the border and better tracking of people here on visas.

2—Reforming the legal immigration system, including awarding green cards to immigrants who obtain advanced degrees in science, math, technology or engineering from an American university.

3—Creating an effective employment verification system to ensure that employers do not hire illegal immigrants.

4—Allowing more low-skill workers into the country and allowing employers to hire immigrants if they can demonstrate they couldn’t recruit a U.S. citizen; and establishing an agricultural worker program.

A.  This would be a blanket amnesty.  The last blanket amnesty also included language to secure the border and track visitors.  Said one blogger, “U.S. Visit, a program to track visitors has never been implemented and the border is just as porous as then.  In addition, few people talk about our northern border which is practically unprotected.  We have seen a surge of illegal alien entry since last year when the White House occupant circumvented Congress with his “discretionary enforcement” policy.  This policy is illegal as described in a lawsuit filed by federal employees of Immigrations Customs enforcement.”

B.  We must educate legal residents and ensure they have a job when they leave school.   Today over 10 million applicants for legal immigration wait at our doors.  Illegal migrants crowd out any chance for legal immigration.

C.  We have a system to identify legal residents but time after time the United States Judiciary rules against using it.  It is called E-Verify. The White House refuses to enforce it.

D.  Current law provides for border security: not enforced.

Reality: we do not need any more immigrants imported into this country with 47.7 million Americans that subsist on food stamps  and another 14 million unemployed permanently. It’s time to take care of America’s poor, unemployed and struggling. Not illegal and legal migrants.  They need to take care of their own countries and improve their own people.

In the end, ask yourself if you want 100 million more immigrants added to America within the next 37 years.

A Stunning 57% of Illegal Immigrants on Welfare

In January, 2013, fully eight million illegal alien migrants live, work and play in America in violation of U.S. immigration laws. Their children attend American schools, receive free medical care, transportation and food stamps. Those eight million migrants displace America’s working poor from jobs. The U.S. Congress refuses to enforce work laws internally. (Source: www.fairus.org)

At the same time, millions of illegal alien migrants subsist on U.S. taxpayer funded welfare programs. Those illegal migrants feed, house and medicate themselves on taxpayer dollars.

Dr. Steven Camorata at the Center for Immigration Studies exposed a glaring problem: A report by the Center for Immigration Studies (www.cis.org) reveals some startling figures about welfare and social-services use by families headed by illegal immigrants.

“In 2010, 36 percent of immigrant-headed households used at least one major welfare program (primarily food assistance and Medicaid) compared to 23 percent of native households,” summarizes the document which was published by the Center for Immigration Studies– and examines a wide variety of topics relating to immigration. Click HERE to read the full report.

“The document breaks down the immigrant (some are legal, most are illegal) families by country of origin… and gives specific types of welfare and percentages of the families that used it in 2010,” said Camorata. “On average, fewer than 23 percent of native households use some type of “welfare” which is specifically defined in the study. On the other hand, 36 percent of households headed by immigrants (some legal, most illegal) use some type of welfare. Some nationalities use “free” social-services more than do others..

“Families headed by immigrants from specific countries or areas of the world range from just over 6 percent for those immigrants from Great Britain to more than 57 percent of those from Mexico (mostly illegal) using some type of welfare.”

In light of this fraud against the American taxpayer, the Congress, along with President Obama expect to pass a total amnesty for over 12 million and as high as 20 million illegal aliens. At that point, they will be able to tap into food stamps, assisted housing, medical care, education, tutoring, ESL and many other aspects provided by the American taxpayer.

“This comprehensive study suggests there are more than 40 million immigrants in the United States… of which more than a 25 percent of that number, and the largest overall group, originate from Mexico,” said Camorata. “While other independent experts tell us we now host more than fifty million “immigrants” (not legal U.S. citizens, and the vast majority are illegals)… this study estimates that approximately 28 percent of immigrants, or just over 11 million, are within the United States illegally. This study also suggests (intentionally conservative estimates) that nearly 50 percent of those immigrants originating from Mexico and Central America are here illegally.

This report is very comprehensive… and examines various statistics of immigrants currently residing in the United States. Overall, state and federal aid use by immigrant families is much higher than that used by families headed by citizens of the United States.

“Many states suffer more than others,” said Camorata. “California, Texas, Illinois, and Florida taxpayers bear a huge burden. The large population of immigrants, both legal and illegal in Eastern Washington and even Spokane affects the state’s budget dramatically.

“Meanwhile,the approaching fiscal cliff is forcing congress and the current administration to contemplate huge cuts to services. Welfare use by immigrants, both illegally and legally within the United States, should be thoroughly examined and considered in making those cuts.”

If you would like more information, you may visit Dr. Steven Camorata at www.cis.org

Conservatives Rationalize As America Circles The Drain

It’s often hard to accept the truth, especially when that truth is scary, when reality seems to offer you no solutions, only poison from which to pick.

It’s as with a man I once knew who insisted it couldn’t be proven that smoking was bad for you. He knew better in his heart, but his available choices — giving up cigarettes or accepting the danger of their use —were both emotionally unpalatable to him. Enter the rationalization.

We’re seeing the same thing with Republicans in the wake of Barack Obama’s re-election. Radio host Sean Hannity, citing changing American demographics, stated a while back that his position on immigration has “evolved”: we now must offer illegals some kind of pathway to citizenship (a.k.a. amnesty). Other conservatives are warning that we must dispense with social issues or the Republican Party will be dispensed with.

Of course, this isn’t always rationalization. Some conservatives, and Hannity is likely among them, may truly believe that we can avoid electoral hell if we have just one more dance with the Devil. Conservatives have always responded to seemingly inevitable political changes by, slowly but surely, compromising their way to tyranny. But rationalization is a huge factor, and what is the scary truth here that conservatives dare not contemplate?

They are losing the culture.

Little by little.

Every day.

And as the culture goes, so go political fortunes.

Let’s spell it out:

1. To paraphrase Lincoln, “The teaching in the schools today will be the politics of tomorrow.” The left has long controlled academia.
2. The media, our conduit of information, is largely controlled by the left.
3. As Plato wrote, “When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.” Just imagine what he would have said about far more influential television and the Internet, two media through which popular culture — which the left controls — is imbibed.

Now, like a computer, people can only process the data they are given. Thus, even when people function logically like a computer (which can be rare), they’re operating within a leftist matrix of ideas forged by the Triumvirate of Evil (TIE): academia, the media, and popular culture. These data entry specialists ensure that it is garbage in as leftist ideology, garbage out as votes.

This brings us to the so-called culture war. The left is the establishment; it controls the above branches of the pen-not-sword military. Conservatives have been reduced to guerrilla warfare, with groups such as the ACLJ, Family Research Council, and Christian Coalition drawing occasional blood; and citizen militia uprisings such as the defense of Chik-fil-A. And while these actions are sometimes successful, they’re always short-lived and are merely defenses that only serve to slow the loss of traditionalist territory. The reality is that there is no culture war. What is occurring now is a pacification effort.

Some conservatives sense this, but the reality is often too frightening to contemplate. You can vote liberals out of office, but how do you control entities whose agents of change are unelected? Boycotts won’t do it because, unlike elections, they require more than a run-up campaign and one voting day of focus and effort; it’s often impossible to get enough people on board, and in the aggregate most don’t have the discipline to persevere in a boycott, anyway. And what of traditionalists reversing the Gramscian march through the institutions by they themselves entering them? Good luck. Time is short, and, besides, TIE leftists are like The Matrix’s sentient programs: they guard all the gates and hold all the keys.

In addition to this, add another element to my eighth-paragraph list:

4. You can supplement your domestically produced leftist voters by importing some ready-made. Most all our new immigrants are de facto socialists.

This won’t be changed, either, because there no longer are the votes to alter our dhimmi-gration model.

So the hear-see-speak-no-evil reality for conservatives is this: politics will always reflect the culture, which is steadily drifting “left.”

And there is no way to democratically reclaim the culture.

So many conservatives shunt this root-rot into their minds recesses and instead focus on growing pretty leaves on the dying tree: they immerse themselves in the political. Oh, perhaps if we fertilize the Hispanic electorate with the manure of amnesty, it will bloom as a Republican rose. Just one more concession!

Fantasy.

Or maybe we just need to stop the blinding sunshine of social issues and try a flood of fiscal conservatism.

Dream.

First, Republicans have already tried focusing on fiscal matters and de-emphasizing social ones. Note that except when answering direct questions, they didn’t talk about social issues much in the 2012 campaign; it was the Democrats, with their WOW (war on women) propaganda, who talked about what the GOP supposedly believed on them. Ah, this only worked because the media offered air support, you say? See the above list. The media won’t suddenly find virtue but will only intensify the pacification effort.

As for the growing Hispanic voting bloc, as I wrote a while back (admittedly, I didn’t provide enough nuance), they don’t mind social conservatism. And since saying, as I did previously, that they are more socially conservative than are whites is imprecise, I’ll rephrase it: Hispanics are less opposed to social conservatism than are whites.

What Hispanics really want is cradle-to-grave handouts, the kind of big government they voted for — but never could quite get — in their native lands. Whether this comes packaged with social conservatism or social liberalism is secondary.

To spell it out more precisely, a higher percentage of whites are passionately opposed to social conservatism, but a higher percentage of whites are also passionately for it. As for Hispanics, the best description of them isn’t socially conservative or liberal, but socially indifferent. They may register the obligatory nod when their priest talks about abortion, but they’d do the same in a setting in which social liberalism was the default. It’s simply not something on which their votes hinge. And because of this indifference, their youth will and do conform to the liberal spirit of the age.

Conclusion: Hispanics are not a natural conservative constituency.

Let’s tackle another myth. We often here that this is a “conservative” country, with a plurality of the electorate describing themselves as conservative; as Pew reported, “40% of Americans[…]describe their views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.” But two important factors are missed here. First, the majority of any nation could be called “conservative,” as the only consistent definition of that term involves a desire to maintain the status quo, and the status quo is determined by the majority. Second, today’s status quo was shaped by yesterday’s left and thus is in that sense “liberal.” This dovetails with the second factor:

Most “moderates” are actually liberals, usually of the lukewarm variety.

How can this be? First, wishy-washy people lacking in principle will hew mostly to what’s fashionable, and, again, progressivism is that. Second, liberals are solipsistic and self-centered and thus see themselves as defining the center (and any deviation from their beliefs as radicalism); hence, even when they are left of our “leftist” middle, in their minds they may be moderates. Third, liberals want to fancy themselves open-minded, so they often like believing they’re voices of reason, moderate and not, perish the thought, extreme. Lastly, both the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have been demonized to a degree, and it takes conviction to brand yourself as one who has unfashionably strayed from the pack. And since liberals are far more likely than conservatives to be relativists — to believe, “Man is the measure of all things” and thus that true principle (which is transcendent) is an illusion —  they tend to care more about social standing than standing on “social constructs” (principles). Ergo, they’re more likely than conservatives to adopt a label that sounds good than one that rings true.

So that is America in 2012. And where do we go from here? For starters, we need to stop fooling ourselves. Many Johnny-come-lately-to-reality types only started talking about Republicans’ demographic and cultural winter after the Nov. 6 election, as if some kind of unforeseeable revolution had taken place. But while it may have represented a tipping point, a long Gramscian evolution had pushed America to that point. A process is in motion, a disease besets us, and if you understand its pathology, you know that no amount of Hispandering or appeals to virtue (e.g., personal responsibility) with an electorate largely lacking in the quality will bear fruit. The remaining healthy acorns need to recognize this, stop trying to fertilize a tree destined for the sawmill, and instead prepare to seed new ground.

Invasion of the Liberal Body Snatchers

When I was a younger and more naïve man, I sometimes thought to myself, “Boy, if I could just get a forum in which to express my ideas, I could really change people’s minds.” This was before I realized that, more often than not, it wasn’t a matter of changing minds. It was a matter of changing hearts.

This is why I shake my head when hearing talk of how conservatives can possibly “win over” women or Hispanics or blacks or whatever the latest pander-worthy group may be, of how they need to “reach out” or “reframe their message,” as if everyone is a logic-worshipping Mr. Spock. After all, even if the media would disseminate the conservative argument without twisting it into a soggy, unpalatable pretzel — which they won’t — did it ever occur to these tacticians that the problem isn’t mainly a matter of intellect, but emotion?

As a related example, I got into a debate years ago with a very amiable man who had moved to the US from Denmark. He was defending socialist policies of his native land’s variety, yet, when I asked him if he intended to return home, his answer was no. Clearly, he rejected the Yankee recipe but still wanted the delicacy.

This is all too common. People often ask how it is that northerners move to the South, or Mexicans and other foreigners to the US, for a better life, but then vote as they did whence they came. Don’t they know this only ensures that the South will become more like the North or the US more like south of the border? Again, whatever they know, it isn’t mainly a matter of knowledge.

Of course, in many cases people do fail to make the proper associations between cause and effect. Yet this is often due to emotional blocks, as the intellect cannot adjudicate facts not given their day in court. Then there is rationalization, when we bend reality for ourselves because we can’t bear to bend our wants to reality. The truth is that the cold intellect is generally outmatched by hot emotion, even, sometimes, when we do know better. The ancient sage Confucius lamented this when saying, “It is not that I do not know what to do; it is that I do not do what I know.” And C.S. Lewis spoke of it when writing in Abolition of Man:

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that “a gentleman does not cheat,” than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.

And I had sooner trust the vote of a person who was quite skeptical about religion, but bred to believe in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, than that of a rote churchgoer who had been brought up among socialists.

Failing to consider how often emotion, or our animal nature, trumps intellect is one of the most common mistakes made when predicting man’s behavior. George W. Bush was guilty of this when making the case for Mideast“nation building” and saying “All people want freedom.” Perhaps. But so does a wild animal in a city zoo; so does a toddler. Yet neither can negotiate civilization without endangering himself and/or others. And this mistake is also apparent in continual Kumbaya calls to ignore the perils of cultural incongruity, such as “All people want the same things.”

Even insofar as this is true, there’s a chasm between wanting and getting. Virtually everyone wants money, but many have neither the focus nor the capacity to acquire it. All want health, but not everyone has the discipline to exercise and live a healthful lifestyle. And let’s say that someone had ravaged his health via poor votes with the knife, fork, pipe, and shot-glass, and then was offered the chance to leap into a robust, pristine body. Unless he was like an alcoholic I know of who refused a liver transplant, saying that she knew she couldn’t change and would also ruin the new liver, he very well might take that leap. Yet his habits would come with him. And what do you think that new body would look like 5 or 10 years hence? You can take the boy out of what is destroyed, but you can’t take the destructiveness out of the boy.

This is the problem with the call to “reach out.” Arguments must first penetrate that filter of emotion before they can reach people’s minds, yet even then there is no guarantee that the people won’t sacrifice what is right in favor of what feels right. And note that when I mentioned “cultural incongruity” earlier, I didn’t just refer to foreigners invading the body of America. I also meant those whose minds and hearts have been snatched through the Triumvirate of Evil (TIE): academia, the media, and popular culture. Its great triumph is that, through an unrivalled conversion rate, it has turned a counter-culture into the dominant one.

But what all our foreigners — both those from abroad and the native-born — have in common is that they bring bad ideological health and its attendant emotions with them. Northerners and Mexicans move to greener pastures because that feels right, then vote for statists because that feels right. Women want security and “reproductive freedom,” young people a hopeful future, and blacks a civil-rights utopia because those things feel right, but then vote for politicians who would destroy their rights, freedom, and future because that feels right. And it all is eminently logical if you understand that man is often illogical.

Lest I be misunderstood, I’m not cynical about reason; after all, presenting reasoned arguments is what I do by trade. But I also know that I’m writing for a different, and perhaps even less fashionable, one percent (slight exaggeration? Perhaps, but you get the point). And we’re not going to reason people out of positions they haven’t reasoned themselves into, to paraphrase Ben Franklin. The “emerging demographic majority” will just behave unreasonably and, like the proverbial scorpion that stung the duck ferrying him across a river, thus guaranteeing both their deaths, essentially say, “I could not help myself. It is my nature!”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that some individuals won’t have a conversion of heart, but anomalies don’t discredit averages. And as ex-KGB Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov said about these “demoralized” people in the 1980s already, “You are stuck with them.” You won’t change them. All you could do is devote 15-20 years to educating a new generation of patriotic Americans, but this requires seizing control of TIE, that axis of destruction that molds minds and, more significantly, hearts. This clearly, however, is impossible within the context of our current republic. And thus are national elections now a fool’s errand for traditionalists.

Instead, as the left has done for ages with drug and immigration laws, we need to focus on the nullification of federal laws in states where we’re still strong — while we still can. We should endeavor to separate from TIE as much as possible by forging and strengthening our own organizations, media, and schooling, like Amish with modernity and muscle. And, like pious Muslims do vis-à-vis the West, we must counteract seduction by the (liberal) dominant culture by viewing it as enemy occupied territory. For just as total separation from what is unclean ensures a clean room’s purity, so do we need more division in America, not less.

This is the reality of our situation. Accepting it would do far more good than trying to take the helm of a ship that sailed, and sank, long ago.

You Cannot Separate A Culture And Its Attendant Civilization

Writer Sam Francis said, “You cannot separate a culture and its attendant civilization from the genetic endowments of its founding people, nor can you expect to transfer it to another people, i.e. [immigrants.]”

Today in America (as well as other Western societies), African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Muslim-Americans and European-Americans share an uneasy if not cautious tolerance for each other across the land. The news reports didn’t talk about the American vote. They discussed the Hispanic vote, the black vote, the white vote and with the addition of another 20 to 30 million Muslims in a few decades—the Islamic vote.

As the American people allow themselves to be transformed into another kind of culture, i.e., a multicultural society, neither democrats who pander to the new cultural paradigm or the republicans who are trying to extend the old successful one—understand the destructive forces facing future generations of an “incompatible mixed bag” of a confusing and forthcoming American non-culture.

This phenomenon also occurs in Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and most of mainland Europe

About half the American electorate feels freaked out by Obama’s re-election. They pray for the next four years to go as fast as possible so they can replace Obama with a republican.

But they fail to understand the direction of America. Within the next four years, somewhere between 12 and 20 million illegal alien migrants will gain full citizenship by Obama’s executive orders or Congress’ lay-down. Another 8 to 10 million immigrants will be imported through legal immigration—in the next four years. Millions of them will tap into Social Security, food stamps and assisted housing. Millions of them will be able to chain-migrate their families into America. Millions will legally displace Americans from their jobs.

Millions of them will become voters and millions of them will elect another person just like Obama. In the land of milk and honey, the minority voter will become the new power in the White House—until, of course, the Fractured States of America collapse via socialism.

Multiculturalism is unworkable and illogical in any society

“A multicultural society is a physical and sociological impossibility,” said Satoshi Kanazawa, professor at the University of Washington. “It is rare that one learns anything important from the pseudo-science of sociology, but one thing it does teach us is that there is no such thing as “multicultural society.”

“When I taught “Introduction to Sociology” at the University of Washington, I had back-to-back lectures during the first week on culture and society. I explained to my students that culture and society were two sides of a coin; one cannot exist without the other. Culture needs society (and its inhabitants) to sustain its existence and initiate its change, and society needs culture to hold it together and survive. Just as there is no such thing as a coin with only one side, there is no such thing as culture without society or society without culture. It is physically impossible to construct a coin with only heads without tails or a coin with only tails without heads. It is equally impossible to have a culture without society or a society without culture.”

While Kanazawa introduces the logical failure of the multicultural model, Francis illustrates that immigrants from incompatible cultures cannot change their own paradigms, cultures and languages to mesh with the host country. It’s an anthropological impossibility. It’s like asking a tiger to lose its stripes to fit in with a pride of lions.

“Nobody disputes these truisms about culture and society from the social sciences, yet the same people also claim that we now live in a “multicultural society,” said Kanazawa. “If you think about it for a moment, you’d realize that the notion of “multicultural society” is a logical and physical impossibility. It is similar to a coin with only one head but several tails. It is physically impossible to construct such a coin.

“That culture needs society to sustain its existence means that multiple cultures require multiple societies. That society needs culture to hold it together means that multiple societies require multiple cultures. There must be exactly the same number of cultures as there are societies, just as there must be exactly the same number of societies as there are cultures. In any bag of coins, regardless of how many coins there are, there are exactly as many heads as there are tails, and vice versa. One culture, one society. “Multicultural society” is a physical (and sociological) impossibility.”

In virtually all Western countries attempting multiculturalism today, immigrants rely on welfare, subsidies and food stamps to exist because they lack the tools to contribute to those societies. Most arrive without the intellectual horsepower to evolve quickly from third world systems to first world complexities.

Great Britain’s Winston Churchill said, “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

As it stands today, 47 million people in America feed themselves off the backs of American workers. Millions more accept unemployment checks. The United States sinks like the Titanic from $16 trillion in debt on its way to $20 trillion within four years—under Obama. Barack Obama has become the “great emancipator” of those who avoid or lack skills to work on a daily basis.

The ones that won’t work or can’t work or suffer illiteracy and can’t hold a job, ride this U.S. Titanic down into the depths.

The result of mass amnesties and mass immigration can be summed up in these two short videos:

In a five minute astoundingly simple yet brilliant video, “Immigration, Poverty, and Gum Balls”, Roy Beck, director of www.numbersusa.ORG, graphically illustrates the impact of endless immigration. Take five minutes to see for yourself:

“Immigration by the numbers—off the chart” by Roy Beck

This 10 minute demonstration shows Americans the results of unending mass immigration on the quality of life and sustainability for future generations: in a few words “Mind boggling!” www.NumbersUSA.org

Obama Calling: America’s Life after Death

I have never been so unhappy to be right. I’ve long said that Barack Obama would win re-election, and two weeks ago I stated as much in print. In making this prediction, I was almost alone among traditionalist pundits, with some, such as Dick Morris (Mr. Batting Zero), actually forecasting a Mitt Romney landslide. And, no, I’m not pointing this out to numb despair with some perverse kind of gloating, like a man consumed in flames looking to suck on an ice cube. It’s because of why I knew that Romney would lose:America is lost. And there is something to be found, but not unless good people understand what truly lies ahead.

America is heading toward a dark winter. Of course, I can’t give you a Mayan-like prediction of a precise time of reckoning; details are always sketchy, which is why I wasn’t entirely right on the micro of the election. But this is much like how it’s difficult to predict the weather for two Wednesdays from now, but easy to forecast cold in February. And of our civilization’s overall weather pattern, there is no doubt. Now let’s discuss what prevents conservatives from seeing the clouds on the horizon.

Rationalization

Many conservatives probably knew better in their hearts than to predict a Romney win, but just couldn’t come to terms with the depressing reality of a second Obama term. Rationalization is common among man; it’s how we avoid unwelcome truths. But it also blinds us to danger. Just think, for instance, of Jews who saw their coming winter in 1930s Germany and emigrated; then think of those who didn’t because they couldn’t face reality. This is how dangerous rationalization can be.

Likewise, for years I and a few others have been warning that fighting in the political arena while losing the culture is like trying to grow beautiful leaves on a tree whose roots are beset by steady rot. Sure, we may win some battles, but they’re merely a rightward movement of deck chairs on a ship steadily drifting left. Yet even when this phenomenon’s specifics are explained to simplicity, they’re often rationalized away by conservatives. Most would rather talk about Obama this and Romney that, about how we just, by gum, need a real conservative. But this is for naught without a real conservative electorate. We can’t elect a better government when we’ve bred a worse people.

And just as I knew Obama would win last night, I’m quite sure of something else.

No truly “conservative” Republican will ever win nationally again.

Ever.

(Don’t click that mouse and grab the hemlock, because there is hope. I’ll get to that later.)

To understand a major reason why, read my piece, “Does the GOP’s Demographic Death Spiral End in a Texas Graveyard?” And to understand why I put “conservative” in quotation marks, click “Conservatism is Dead; Long Live Conservatism.” I’ll give many such recommendations in this piece, as they’re necessary background for a proper understanding of our coming dark days.

But let’s start with a simple fact: Mitt Romney is a photogenic, articulate, moderate Republican who was up against a scandal-ridden leftist radical presiding over a listing economy and foundering foreign policy. Still he couldn’t win.

Or, I should say, voters chose to lose.

Because what the American people were before, they are no more.

I know, I know. The media deceived the citizenry. Romney started playing not to lose instead of to win. There was vote fraud. There was that storm and Chris Christie playing Misty for Mr. Limp Wristy.

Rationalization.

Oh, it’s not that the above isn’t true. But no candidate is tactically perfect; Obama certainly made his share of mistakes. There also will inevitably be unforeseen events during any campaign, and they don’t matter when enough people can distinguish good from evil. And the left does steal hearts and minds through the media and votes through electoral sleight-of-hand, but this merely reflects our cultural decay. And it’s only getting worse.

If You Can’t Get Elected, Appoint a New People

This variation on a Bertolt Brecht line gets at our problem. And our new people has been forged via both importation and domestic production.

While conservatives complain about illegal migration — ever more tepidly — I’ve been warning that it was merely an exacerbation of a larger problem: legal immigration, through which statists have been importing reliably socialist voters. This I have explained thoroughly over and over and over and over and over and over again, yet most conservatives won’t touch the issue. This is partially due to “immigrationism,” dogma stating that immigration must be a permanent and unquestioned fixture of American life (death?); partially due to pundit cowardice; and partially due to rationalization. After all, immigration is here to stay, we think, so better to shunt its scary implications to the mind’s recesses, where the rest of the wild things are.

But I’ll make this simple: remember the pre-election stories about how Obama was wildly popular overseas? The English are enchanted, the French are all aflutter,Indonesia is infatuated, and Kenya is kvelling. Obama isn’t foreign to foreigners, and do you think this will change because the foreigners come here? Just as with religion, people bring their ideology with them. And unless you think you could talk a Muslim jihadist out of Islam, why suppose you could talk a socialist out of socialism?

The world’s consensus political orientation is no surprise, mind you. Note that nascent, adolescent, and young adult America was the rarest of anomalies, as man’s historical default is tyranny. And as geriatric America has proven, it’s difficult enough instilling the mindset that birthed her into the native born, never mind those who come here in the hardened clay of adulthood. Having said this, there is a reason why we are being, as Alan Keyes put it, “colonized….”

“Israel hath cast off the thing that is good; the enemy shall pursue him. They have reigned, but not by me: they have been princes, and I knew not….” — Hosea 8:3-4

As a people’s morality goes, so go its fortunes. You simply cannot be one kind of people but have another kind of government (see “Written in the Eternal Constitution”). And what has happened to our sense of virtue in America? So lost it is that even the word has been replaced with “values,” that fixture of the atheistic literary style. For decades we have instilled children with leftism, nihilism, hedonism, relativism, and atheism through academia, the media, and popular culture; we have seduced them into sin and made them, as Ben Franklin wrote, “more corrupt and vicious, [so] they have more need of masters.” For sure, masters will be one’s lot if he has not mastered himself.

And this inner anarchy has outward manifestations: the imagery of pagan barbarism. Like primitive tribesmen, the young today deface themselves with tattoos and body piercings; the tramp stamp has become a stamp of youth-generation membership, while even large earlobe rings, something the West previously reserved to Discovery Channel documentaries, are now worn. And this physiognomy correlates with a certain voting pattern. Do you know what it is?

Speaking of voting patterns, for my atheist friends…

“It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains” — Patrick Henry

Like many reading this, I once was that rare breed: a conservative agnostic. And, like so many who bristle when I now promote faith, I probably didn’t realize how rare I was — and always would be.

Fox News alluded to this when trying to explain Obama’s win last evening, pointing out that religiously unaffiliated people are 20 percent of the U.S.for the first time ever. And does a poll showing that this burgeoning group of Americans favors Obama surprise you? It shouldn’t. There is a strong atheism-statism correlation the world over, which is why it’s no coincidence that “conservatives” in heavily secular Western Europe are simpatico with our liberals. Take note of this before you cheer the diminution of faith and fancy it can be replaced with Ayn Randism. Without the Christian right, there is no right at all.

So where do we go from here? First, we must stop rationalizing and look truth in the eye. There are no national ballot-box solutions, and America’s winter is nigh. And will we, as all civilizations eventually do, soon go the way of ancient Rome? It’s possible. Remember, however, that when Rome fell there were still people living in her lost lands. They still had to forge societies. And some did a better job than others.

And what of the immediate future? Well, I’ll write more about that in the coming months. For now I’ll leave it at this: what would you do if you were part of an organization whose leadership became ever more tyrannical and intransigent?

We must focus on our states and localities, on uncompromisingly doing the right thing within them. Are you with me? Because all I can say is that if I were a governor, I would certainly make news. What else can you do when caught in the course of human events?

A Multicultural Society Is Not Logical Or Workable

“A multicultural society is a physical and sociological impossibility.” Satoshi Kanazawa, college professor.

One look around the globe shows that religious and cultural factions fight and kill one another with accelerating violence as they come in closer competition for water, energy, land and food. One look at Lebanon, United Kingdom, Holland, France, Norway, Iraq and many other countries where cultures co-exist—amply illustrates Kanazawa’s contention.
Another look around the world shows that cultures compete for dominance in every country where cultures attempt to co-exist. It doesn’t work in Canada or Mexico. It’s not working in the United States of America.

Racial and cultural unrest checker every year of every decade of America’s existence. It smolders and simmers under the surface in 2012. The more incompatible cultures imported into America, they will boil over and scald many in the years ahead.

What is culture?

Edward Tylor said that culture is, “That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Of course, it is not limited to men. Women possess and create it as well. Since Tylor’s time, the concept of culture has become the central focus of anthropology.

“Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon,” said Tylor. “It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture. They are not culture in themselves. For this reason, archaeologists cannot dig up culture directly in their excavations. The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns–they are things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills.”

In 2012, many western countries like Canada, France, Norway, Sweden and others find their own cultures being usurped if not destroyed by mass immigration.

Can cultures co-exist in the same country? Answer: no!

“When I used to teach “Introduction to Sociology” at the University of Washington, I had back-to-back lectures during the first week on culture and society,” said Kanazawa. “I explained to my students that culture and society were two sides of a coin; one cannot exist without the other. Culture needs society (and its inhabitants) to sustain its existence and initiate its change, and society needs culture to hold it together and survive. Just as there is no such thing as a coin with only one side, there is no such thing as culture without society or society without culture. It is physically impossible to construct a coin with only heads without tails or a coin with only tails without heads. It is equally impossible to have a culture without society or a society without culture.”

When any society begins to speak multiple languages via immigration, it begins to fracture as to communication among its citizenry. Once communications and “similar thinking” fragment, balkanization and separation ensue. Today in America, Muslims cannot and do not assimilate into American culture or any Western cultures. They enclave. The same holds true for Mexicans in America. They separate into their own barrios. It’s not racist; it’s biological; it’s tribal.

“As an integral aspect of human culture, language cannot exist without a society of speakers speaking it daily and interacting with each other,” said Kanazawa. “Nobody disputes these truisms about culture and society from the social sciences, yet the same people also claim that we now live in a “multicultural society.” If you think about it for a moment, you’d realize that the notion of “multicultural society” is a logical and physical impossibility. It is similar to a coin with only one heads but several tails. It is physically impossible to construct such a coin.”

Kanazawa exposes the obvious. Competing cultures cannot and do not work within a country. It goes against millions of years of human activity.

Can multiple societies exist within a civilization? Can one coin possess one head and two tails? Answer: no!

“That culture needs society to sustain its existence means that multiple cultures require multiple societies,” said Kanazawa. “That society needs culture to hold it together means that multiple societies require multiple cultures. There must be exactly the same number of cultures as there are societies, just as there must be exactly the same number of societies as there are cultures. In any bag of coins, regardless of how many coins there are, there are exactly as many heads as there are tails, and vice versa. One culture, one society. “Multicultural society” is a physical (and sociological) impossibility.”

If the United States and Canada or Western Europe hope to survive in the 21st century as viable and cohesive societies, they must curtail mass immigration from incompatible cultures. If they fail to take action, they will face endless strife for their citizens as well as the immigrants. Multiculturalism doesn’t work on every level of human interaction.

As resources diminish, food grows scarcer and energy depletes, we will witness more clashing cultures within all Western countries that imported large numbers from incompatible cultures.

Samuel Huntington, author of Clash of Civilizations, said it rather logically: “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

What Happens When California Is No Longer California: No Longer American?

Each day, California adds 1,655 people, net gain, to its population. That horrific human overload stems from endless legal and illegal immigration.  California stands as the most immigrant dominated state in the country.  At 38 million in 2012, it expects to add 20 million people by 2040.  Most of them immigrants and their children. (Source: www.capsweb.org)

This is not about race, creed or color. It’s about sustainable numbers. It’s about water, energy, resources, food, transports and quality of life.  We need a discussion on how many people California and the United States can continue importing from foreign lands where world citizens refuse to be responsible for their own birth rates.  Frankly, Europe, Australia and Canada must engage the same question.

By adding another 20 million to California, not only will it overload their water supplies, but it will deplete land, energy and resources. It will change the very culture, language and essence of California and ultimately, America.  We must ask ourselves as Americans if we want to continue on this path, can we sustain this path, will future generations be able to enjoy quality of life and a decent standard of living with such a massive human overload?  Answer: most definitely not.

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, www.FAIRUS.org , spoke about it in his latest report.

“California Governor Brown vetoed a bill which would have prevented local authorities from honoring federal requests for detention of illegal aliens arrested for other crimes in the state,” said Stein. “If AB 1081, also known as the Trust Act, had become law, deportable criminal aliens would have been turned loose in communities all across California with the likely result that many would have reoffended.

“The last minute veto announcement is a rare victory for law-abiding Californians. The powerful lobby dedicated to protecting illegal aliens mobilized to push for the Governor’s signature on AB 1081 in the final weeks leading up to the veto deadline. House Democrats from California, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, unions, day laborer groups, clergy members, and even actor Martin Sheen voiced support for the fundamentally flawed and dangerous legislation.

“Illegal alien advocacy groups and politicians pushed the bill in order to prevent the successful use of the Secure Communities initiative and thwart the federal government’s ability to hold and remove illegal aliens, even those arrested for or convicted for serious or violent crimes. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director John Morton has said such policies in other jurisdictions – including Cook County, Illinois, and Santa Clara, California – “undermine public safety and hinder ICE’s ability to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”

“Families of the victims of criminal aliens focused their pain and outrage on stopping this bill. The Shaw family of Los Angeles, in particular, is due credit for helping stop AB 1081. Their continued concern over California’s sanctuary policies and efforts to prevent future family tragedies led them to speak out against the legislation. They helped put a face – that of their late son Jamiel Shaw, Jr. – on the real consequences of turning criminal aliens loose into communities.

“FAIR is encouraged that Governor Brown listened to the pleas of the victims’ families and sheriffs across California who urged him to veto this dangerous legislation. However, Brown indicated that he would be open to working with lawmakers to develop and implement a narrower version of the bill to allow “minor” offenders to avoid deportation.”

Gov. Brown Grants Driver’s Licenses to Illegal Aliens
Defeat for Public Safety and Common Sense

“While California Governor Brown made an important veto in the case of AB 1081, he caved into pressure from the illegal alien lobby by signing a bill that will give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens benefiting from President Obama’s administrative amnesty program,” said Stein. “AB 2189 had been sitting on Governor Brown’s desk since it passed the California legislature in late August. As with other pending immigration legislation, Brown waited until the last possible minute to act.

“With this law, illegal aliens who receive deferred action under Obama’s amnesty plan will have access to California driver’s licenses. This means that the estimated 450,000 illegal aliens in the state who are or will be eligible for amnesty will now get yet another benefit for breaking U.S. immigration law. The law was introduced by Assemblyman Gil Cedillo’s (D-Los Angeles), who has spent years pushing an even broader bill to give driver’s license to all illegal aliens in the state.

“In addition to adding yet another benefit to the laundry list of services state taxpayers provide for illegal aliens, the law is an outright threat to public safety in all 50 states. California will give licenses to those illegal aliens who obtain work authorization from the Obama administration, ignoring the loopholes and lack of security inherent in the amnesty program. The administration’s plan allows illegal aliens to skip in-person interviews and submit copies of identification and other documents – there’s no guarantee that amnesty applicants will even be who they say they are.

“California is the first state to expand driver’s license eligibility to illegal aliens since the announcement of Obama’s amnesty policy. Other states like Arizona and Nebraska have reaffirmed policies barring illegal aliens from state benefits and identification. New Mexico and Washington already allowed illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses.”

We need to ask ourselves as a country if we want to continue mass immigration that will lead to these enormous numbers of people that have to be watered, fed, housed, warmed, transported and sustained?  Can we do it on a level of resource usage that typical Americans maintain?  Answer: it is mathematically impossible.

Join www.FAIRUS.org to help change the course of history.

Dan Stein can be reached at www.FAIRUS.org .

Frosty Wooldridge is a member of the board of directors at FAIR.

What Barack Obama Has Done To Our Country In 34 Months

After an embarrassing 34 months in office, how can Barack Obama even run for a second term? After starting off three years ago by bowing to other heads of state in submission, how can he lead the most powerful country in the world? He cannot run on his record because it suffers a dismal record.

These points rush around the Internet without a byline, so I felt it worth the time to quantify what they mean and how Obama fails the American people on multiple levels. As Clint Eastwood said, “When someone doesn’t do the job, we have to let them go.”

Obama promised to reduce the national debt, but instead, he added $5 trillion. Folks, we are beyond broke. We are headed for a crash with our debt. It won’t be pretty. It could very well destroy the foundation of our republic. As our second president, John Adams said, “There are two ways to defeat a country: by the sword or by debt.”

If any other of our presidents had proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?

If any other of our presidents joined the country of Mexico and sued a state in the United States to force that state to continue to allow illegal immigration, would you question his patriotism and wonder who’s side he was on? This really ticks me off because Arizona passed S.B. 1070 to protect itself from a million illegal aliens that bankrupted its schools, hospitals and prisons. Yet, Obama sued Arizona on the side of Mexico. All the while, Obama refused to secure our borders and enforce internal immigration laws. Preposterous that he thinks he can run again for president. He should run for janitor of an elementary school.

If any other of our presidents had pronounced the Marine Corps like Marine Corpse, would you think of him as a patriot? He never served and he wouldn’t know a platoon from a company.

If any other of our presidents had put 87,000 workers out of work by arbitrarily placing a moratorium on offshore oil drilling on companies that have one of the best safety records of any industry because one foreign company had an accident, would you have agreed?

If any other of our presidents had been the first President to need a Teleprompter installed to able

to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes? The fact remains that Obama never qualified for the presidency in the first place. He did not merit the emotional vote that gave him the White House any more than he earned the Nobel Peace Prize after a month in office. It’s all a charade.

If any other of our presidents had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take his First Lady to a play in NYC, would you have approved? How could Obama spend ridiculous amounts of our tax dollars to squire his wife around NYC or Spain? It’s unconscionable.

If any other of our presidents had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved? Or how about all of us that have our “guns and religion?”

If any other of our presidents had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought it a proud moment for America? If any other of our presidents had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia would you have approved?

If any other of our presidents had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have approved? That mistake showed Obama’s incompetence at the highest level. How many other mistakes did he make? Answer: plenty.

If any other of our presidents had stated that there were 57 states in the United States, wouldn’t you have had second thoughts about his capabilities? It shows his Muslim heritage and his Islamic bias because 57 refers to something about Islam.

If any other of our presidents had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to “Cinco de Cuatro” in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo), and continued to flub it when he tried again, wouldn’t you have winced in embarrassment?

If any other of our presidents had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded that he is totally out of touch?

If any other of our presidents had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans, would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?

If any other of our presidents had created the position of 32 Czars who report directly to him, bypassing the House and Senate on much of what is happening in America, would you have ever approved?

Finally, he usurped the U.S. Congress by defying the fact that the entire body defeated the Dream Act because the American people did not want it. They want immigration laws enforced and they want massive legal immigration stopped. Our country cannot keep importing the endless masses of the world onto our shores. It’s not sustainable. Obama doesn’t understand that fact.

Yes, Obama failed us on many levels and now, it’s time to let him go. Clint Eastwood will prove a very prophetic man.

America R.I.P.

During the second half of the 20th century the United States was an opportunity society. The ladders of upward mobility were plentiful, and the middle class expanded. Incomes rose, and ordinary people were able to achieve old-age security.

In the 21st century the opportunity society has disappeared. Middle class jobs are scarce. Indeed, jobs of any kind are scarce. To stay even with population growth from 2002 through 2011, the economy needed about 14 million new jobs. However, at the end of 2011 there were only 1 million more jobs than in 2002. http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cesbtab1.htm 

Only 426,000 of these jobs are in the private sector. The bulk of the net new jobs consist of waitresses and bartenders and health care and social assistance. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over the 9 years, employment for waitresses and bartenders increased by 1,188,000. Employment in health care and social assistance increased 3,087,000. These two categories accounted for 1,000% of the net private sector job growth.

As for manufacturing jobs, they not only did not grow with the population but declined absolutely. During these nine years, 3.5 million middle class manufacturing jobs were lost.

Over the entire nine years, only 48,000 new jobs were created for architects and engineers.

In the 21st century the US economy has been able to create only a few new jobs and these are in lowly paid domestic services that cannot be offshored, such as waitresses and bartenders.

The lack of jobs, especially high value-added, high productivity jobs, is the reason real median household income has declined and the distribution of income has worsened. Without rising real household income, there cannot be a consumer economy.

In the early years of the 21st century, the Federal Reserve substituted a rise in consumer debt to drive the economy in place of the missing rise in consumer incomes. Low interest rates drove up housing prices, and people refinanced their mortgages and spent the equity. The Federal Reserve kept the economy alive by loading up consumers with debt that housing prices and consumer incomes would soon be unable to support.

When debt and real estate prices reached unsustainable levels, the bubble popped, and the ongoing financial crisis was upon us.

The cause of all of the problems is the offshoring of Americans’ jobs. When jobs are moved offshore, consumers’ careers and incomes, and the GDP and payroll and income tax base associated with those jobs, go with them. When the goods and services produced for American markets by offshored labor are brought into the US to be sold, the trade deficit rises, and downward pressure is put on the dollar, pushing up domestic inflation. (On October 12, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reported that “third-quarter wholesale inflation jumped to an annualized 6.2%.”)

Jobs offshoring is driven by Wall Street, “shareholder advocates,” the threat of takeovers, and by large retailers, such as Walmart. By cutting labor costs, profits go up.It is that simple. However, as a result of sending American jobs to cheap labor countries, US consumer incomes go down. The end result is to destroy the domestic consumer market. What would have been US consumer income growth becomes instead profit growth for US corporations.

Keynesian economists use in their textbooks the example of how the aggregate effect of individual saving could be the opposite of the effect intended by the individuals. Whereas each saver seeks to improve his position by building wealth, in the aggregate saving could exceed investment, resulting in a decline in aggregate demand and a fall in income for all. Offshoring has the same logic. Each corporation can expect to gain more profits from moving US jobs offshore, but the aggregate effect is a fall in American consumer incomes and a reduction in the American consumer market.

I have told this story many times. But policymakers, the media, and economists seem unable to connect the dots.

Jobs offshoring has substantial implications for Social Security and Medicare. The US has the least adequate social safety net of any developed country. The two major components of the US social safety net are Social Security and Medicare for the elderly. Social Security and Medicare are financed by a payroll tax. The combined tax is 15.3% of payrolls. For the past quarter of a century the Social Security portion of the payroll tax has built up a surplus of over $2 trillion. Recently, the Medicare portion began running in the red.

Right-wing Republicans, free market ideologues, and the left-wing have all indoctrinated themselves with incorrect beliefs about Social Security and Medicare. The right-wing claims that a safety net financed with 15.3% of payrolls is a “Ponzi scheme” and an “unfunded liability.” If that is the case, then so are veterans benefits, military pensions, and federal pensions, all of which are financed by the income tax, the basis for the payroll tax.

The left-wing claims that the rich do not pay high enough payroll taxes, because the income subject to Social Security payroll tax is capped at about $110,000. But the benefits are also capped. Social Security is not supposed to be an income redistribution scheme from rich to poor, and it is not supposed to be a pension system for the rich. The pension paid is supposed to correlate with the pre-retirement income level of the retiree. Those who had higher wages or salaries and consequently paid more in payroll taxes receive a larger Social Security check than those who had lower wages and salaries and paid less payroll taxes, although there is favoritism toward the lower income earners who receive proportionally more in respect to their payroll taxes than higher income earners.

There is no cap on income subject to the Medicare portion of the payroll tax. Moreover, Medicare charges a Medicare Part B premium that is deducted from the Social Security monthly check. In addition, there is a further Part B premium based on retirement age income. For example, someone working beyond retirement age and making $250,000 per year pays about $3,800 in Medicare Part B premium in addition to the Medicare portion of the payroll tax of about $7,500. The annual premium he pays for his “free” Medicare for which he has paid all his working life with a payroll tax is about $11,300.

Moreover, Medicare by itself is insufficient coverage. To actually have medical coverage, those covered by Medicare have to purchase a supplementary private policy to cover the large gaps in Medicare. Depending on the range of coverage, a supplementary policy costs approximately $100 to $300 per month.

As the person making $250,000 per year is likely to go for the most coverage, he will be paying about $14,900 (excluding deductions and co-payments) per year for his “free” Medicare. This is despite having paid the Medicare payroll tax each year of his working life. A person who made $250,000 in taxable income per year for 30 years would have paid $217,500 into Medicare at the current Medicare payroll tax rate.

The right-wing’s notion that Social Security and Medicare are handouts, part of the welfare state’s bread and circuses, and the left-wing’s idea that the rich get a free ride are equally untrue.

(Note: $250,000 is the politicians’ dividing line between the rich and the rest of us. For a person making $50,000 a year, an income five times larger can seem rich. However, a $250,000 annual income leaves a family or person far distant from the lifestyle of the rich. Upper middle class incomes are generally associated with high-tax, high-cost urban areas in states with high income taxes. After federal income and payroll taxes, state income and sales taxes, and property taxes, what appears to many as a large income disappears. In New York City, the federal income tax will take about 25% of the $250,000, New York state will take about 9%, and New York City will take about 3.65%. The combined city and state sales tax is 8.875%. The property tax is high. The conclusion is that in New York City a $250,000 income is reduced to $125,000 or thereabouts. Those who claim “the rich don’t pay taxes” are not talking about $250,000 incomes.)

Social Security and Medicare have served the country well. They protect the individual from his own mistakes, from crooked and incompetent money managers, and from financial crises, and they protect society from the moral dilemma of confronting large numbers of fellow citizens who through fault or no fault of their own cannot provide for their livelihood and medical care. After the financial scandals and crisis of the past five years, it is a stretch to believe that any but the astute can manage their personal wealth, whether small or large, in today’s situation of unregulated financial markets, zero interest rates, currency uncertainty, and highly complex investment instruments with computers programmed with mathematical models dominating equity trades.

The argument that conceptually a person could do better by investing his payroll taxes in the stock market is a poor basis for old age security policy. The person can do better as long as he or she doesn’t fall into the hands of a Bernie Madoff or a Goldman Sachs, doesn’t receive zero interest on his bonds because the Federal Reserve has to bail out the “too big to fail banks,” doesn’t experience a decline in currency value due to monetization of enormous federal deficits, and doesn’t experience a bear market as he approaches retirement.

The right-wing ideologues who try to scare old age security out of existence go on and on about rising medical costs, about an aging population living longer, declining birthrates and a worsening ratio of workers to retirees, about people learning to rely on handouts rather than their own means, and about Washington’s rising unfunded liabilities.

Scare projections are designed to scare, and most are untenable. For example, longevity was a product of rising incomes, good diet, and antibiotics. Today only the upper crust have rising incomes. Antibiotics are wearing out from abuse and rising immunity of bacteria. Diet is compromised in ways still poorly understood as a result of GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, pumping chicken, pork, and beef full of antibiotics and hormones and feeding the animals GMO grains and also possibly infected animal byproducts, and pumping our water full of fluoride. A variety of destructive activities and behaviors are causing ecological damage. Longevity might have been a short-term benefit of irreproducible conditions considering the mounting ecological damage and the rise of superbugs, stress, and tainted food and water production.

The projection of an aging population might also be wrong. Clearly, the post-World War II baby boomers are aging, but do the projections take into account the legislated 1965 immigration increases plus the illegal influx from Mexico and points south of young people with high birth rates? How can it be that a country with allegedly 30 million illegal immigrants, whose children born in the US are citizens, has a declining birth rate? How do we know that the illegal population will not continue to increase?

There are so many Spanish speaking people in the US today that if a person calls any of his utility companies, whether telephone, Internet, water, electricity, TV, or any of his credit card companies, or his bank, he has to select English or Spanish. Obviously, as
anti-immigration sites make clear, the US population is changing in its national origin, and there appears to be no sign of an aging Hispanic population. How many old Spanish speaking people do you see in the US compared to the young?

When confronted with this apparent fact, the response is: “why will the Hispanics pay for the aging white population?” The answer is: because they are in the same payroll tax system and the taxes will be withheld from their wages and salaries just as they are from everyone else’s.

It is possible that if Hispanics in the US have suffered years of hostility, accusations, and hatred from “the ice people,” once Hispanics are sufficiently numerous to control the legislature, assuming one still exists, or to take over the executive branch, the only seat of power, they may in retribution cut off the aging whites. But if so, the whites will have brought it on themselves.

Whatever the scare projections that are mustered to undermine the public provision of old age security, the real financial danger is never mentioned. The only significant financial danger to Social Security and Medicare is the offshoring of American jobs and GDP. A country without a job base is without a payroll tax base. If the only jobs that the 21st century “world’s only superpower” economy can create are for waitresses, bartenders, and health care and social assistance (hospital orderlies and practical nurses), payroll tax revenues will be less than if the US still had 20 million workers and rising in well-paid manufacturing jobs instead of 11 million.

Regardless of Medicare’s financing, the death knell for the elderly was the legality of abortion. If the yet to be born are an insufferable burden, imagine the cost of the elderly. As far as the state is concerned, once you stop producing income and payroll tax revenues for the state, it is time for you to die. Washington would rather enact euthanasia than to pay back the $2+ trillion in the Social Security trust fund that Washington spent, leaving only non-marketable IOUs in the account.

Readers might think that Americans would never stand for death by injection for the elderly once the qualified age is reached. But why would they not? They have accepted millions of aborted babies, and Americans, including the elderly, have stood for Washington’s murder, maiming and displacement of millions of Muslim men, women, and children in 7 countries over the past 11 years and are yet to show any signs of remorse for their complicity in mass murder. Next month tens of millions of Americans will vote for Mitt Romney who believes Obama isn’t killing Muslims fast enough.

The new “Obamneycare” health legislation does have “death panels.” They are not called that, and they do not make formal decisions to terminate lives. But it comes to almost the same thing. Various panels, committees, or bureaucratic departments are empowered to make decisions about “effective care.” It has long been known that most health care costs are associated with the last year of life. Cost and age will be elements in determining standards of care. The greater the weight assigned to cost, the more care will be withheld. In effect, the “effective care” panel is a “death panel.”

Prior to the advent of the new “health care” system, Medicare and or hospitals are already shifting costs to Medicare patients. To avoid penalties and fraud allegations for “medically unnecessary hospitalizations,” rather than formally admit Medicare patients as inpatients, hospital administrators classify them as outpatients “under observation.”
According to a Brown University analysis of Medicare records in 2007, 2008, and 2009, the ratio of Medicare observation patients to those admitted as inpatients rose by 34 percent.

Being classified an outpatient under observation eliminates medicare coverages, especially for post-operative or post-accident rehabilitation care, leaving Medicare patients with bills in the tens of thousands of dollars (AARP Bulletin, October 2012).

Other costs are being shifted to doctors and to hospitals. Medicare pays fixed prices for each covered procedure or test, and these prices can be as low as half of the billed prices. During a period when costs incurred by providers of health care have been rising, Medicare has been cutting the amounts it pays providers.

As the payroll tax is commingled with general tax revenues, Social Security and Medicare payroll tax collections can be diverted to other purposes and, thus, are always subject to competing budgetary demands, such as the previous 11 years of gratuitous wars and the bailouts of “banks too big to fail,” or to deficit reduction demands as the government consistently overspends all revenue sources.

A national health service is the only way to control health costs and provide the population with health care coverage. A national health system takes the many levels of profits out of the system and also reams of compliance and liability costs. A national health system can coexist with a private system for those who can afford it or whose employers are sufficiently profitable to provide it.

As Jarad Diamond reveals in his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, societies fail, if not because of their moral bankruptcy, then because their rulers are only capable of short-term thinking. The future is beyond their interest. The US offshored its economy, because it worked short-term for corporate executives (rewarded with multi-million dollar performance bonuses), Wall Street (rewarded with profits), shareholders (rewarded with capital gains), and politicians (rewarded with corporate and Wall Street campaign contributions).

Incompetent free market economists confused jobs offshoring with free trade. They said the country would and was benefiting by giving its manufacturing, industrial, and tradable professional service jobs to China and India, that the US was ridding itself of “dirty fingernail jobs” and would soon be flush with highly paid high-tech jobs and highly paid financial service jobs.

None of these promises or predictions were true. Nowhere in the government’s jobs statistics are there any of these promised replacement jobs. The economists who provided cover for the destruction of the US economy were rewarded by the corporations with speaking fees, grants for their university departments, and newspaper columns paid for by corporate advertisers. Those few who told the truth were expelled from the corporate media that Bill and Hilary Clinton allowed to be monopolized (for campaign contributions, of course).

The future of old age security in the United States has been lost, because the job base has been given away to foreigners in order to maximize incomes in the short-run for the few decision-makers.

The misrepresentation of jobs offshoring as free trade has destroyed the prospects of cities, counties, and states along with those of unions and millions of Americans who once had a secure future. It has destroyed the prospects of class after class of university graduates burdened with student loans who expected to step into the jobs that have been offshored or filled by H-1B visa holders from abroad.

The American work force has been forsaken by the corporations and by Washington, and this means that Social Security and Medicare have also been forsaken.

As I predicted in the early years of this new century, “the United States will be a third world country in 20 years.” We might get there even sooner as Washington exhausts what little is left of American wealth in gratuitous wars in service to Israel and the US Military/Security Complex, in unaffordable military buildups in futile hopes of establishing hegemony over China and Russia, and in negative interest rates from the Federal Reserve’s effort to drive up the book value of debt instruments on the balance sheets of financial institutions.

In 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelly forecast America’s future:

“I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed:
On the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Writing in the October 15 online CounterPunch, John V. Walsh, relying on charts prepared by economics professor Mark J. Perry at the University of Michigan and blogger John Hunter, concludes that it is a myth that US manufacturing is in decline.

Walsh says that the loss of US manufacturing jobs is due to automation, not to offshoring. Think about this for a moment. Perry’s graph on which Walsh relies shows the sharp drop in US manufacturing employment to be a 21st century experience. However, automation has been around for a long time. The notion that its effect on employment only showed up recently needs an explanation that is not provided. The steep drop in US manufacturing employment that began in 2000 does correspond with the date at which jobs offshoring began to bite hard.

Why does automation not also affect Chinese manufacturing, especially as most of the Chinese manufacturing technology came from the US as US corporations offshored their production for the US market? If Chinese manufacturing is not up to date with automation, like the US is assumed to be, how do the Chinese, even with cheap labor, undersell US automated factories? How did Chinese manufacturing employment increase in a mere four years by an amount equal to the total manufacturing employment in the US?

The US Bureau of Economic Analysis shows only 11.2 million full time US manufacturing jobs in 2010. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows 11.7 million US manufacturing jobs in 2011, down from 15.3 million in 2002.

In contrast, China, an industrial and manufacturing backwater for most of my life, had 112 million manufacturing jobs in 2006. In a mere four years (2002-2006), the increase in China’s manufacturing employment was as large as today’s total employment in US manufacturing. As long ago as 2006, China’s manufacturing employment was about 10 times the current US manufacturing employment. The Chinese population is about 4 times larger than the US population, but China’s manufacturing population is proportionately greater–10 times larger. Indeed, Chinese manufacturing employees almost equal the total number of employees in all occupations in the US (Manufacturing and Technology News, December 15, 2009).

Obviously, something is wrong with Walsh’s article or the graphs on which he relied.

America’s manufacturing prowess cannot be found in the statistical data. The US is primarily an exporter of Agricultural commodities. The US imports almost twice the amount of manufactured goods as it exports. Indeed, according to the US Census Bureau Statistical Abstract of the US http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1308.pdf US imports of manufactured goods are 5.5 times larger than US imports of crude oil and 4 times larger than all imports of mineral fuel. Yet, we hear about energy dependency, not manufacturing dependency.

As of 2010 the “superpower” US economy still had a trade surplus in airplanes and airplane parts and a small $6 billion surplus in scientific instruments, but that is about all.

In ADP equipment and office machinery, the US exported $22.2 billion in 2010 (latest information at time of writing), down from $44.6 billion in 2000. US imports in 2010 of ADP equipment and office machinery were $113.5 billion, or 5.1 times exports.

The US cannot even make its own clothes and shoes. In 2010 footwear imports are 28.7 times exports. Clothing imports are 24.6 times exports.

Electrical machinery exports were $77 billion; imports were $120 billion.

Exports of power generating machinery were $33 billion; imports were $42 billion.

Exports of television, VCRs were $21.5 billion; imports were $137 billion.

US exports of vehicles was $88 billion; imports were $179 billion.

US news reports of thousands upon thousands of discharged US workers never cite their replacement by automation. The news story is always that the plant is being closed and the jobs moved abroad. Any review of America’s former manufacturing centers verifies this. Boarded up plants and cities and towns in decline are the remains of America’s formerly world dominant manufacturing economy.

The loss of the US post-war trade surplus in manufacturing has left the US with a huge trade deficit. The charts on which Walsh relied left him unaware of the fact that China has a large trade surplus with the US, and the US has a large trade deficit not only with China but with the world.

The fact that the US has to import not only manufactured goods, but also high-technology products from China, an inconceivable outcome during the second half of the 20th century, is powerful testimony to the decline of the US as a manufacturing powerhouse.

It took some doing to obscure the facts and to present the US as a rival to China in manufacturing prowess. How did it happen?

The fault might lie in the way statistical information is collected and presented. Apple, for example, is a US corporation. It reports its worldwide earnings to the IRS. Its manufacturing is counted as US manufacturing as it is a US corporation. However, Apple doesn’t produce a single computer in the US. They are produced in China. The employment that Apple reports is in China. The Chinese are employed by an American company, but they are not Americans. The Chinese incomes that Apple provides do not support the American consumer market or provide the tax base for cities and states. The Chinese incomes do not provide ladders of upward mobility or careers for Americans.

The wages Apple pays are in China. The consumer incomes and GDP that it generates are in China. When Apple’s computers come back to America to be sold they come in as imports. But Apple’s manufacturing and employment are reported as the output and employment of an American company.

When statistics and the methods by which they are compiled were put into effect, countries did not offshore their production for their domestic markets. Foreign investments were made for selling abroad, not for selling in the home market. With the advent of offshoring, counting the employment and output of US firms that are producing abroad for their domestic market as an indication of the strength of US manufacturing is very misleading. Apple, for example, has done more to boost China’s GDP than to boost America’s GDP. This is true of every US corporation that offshores its production for US consumers.

In recent years the percentage of the work forces of large US corporations that is foreign sourced has risen rapidly. Some of the overseas hiring reflects traditional foreign investment in which a company builds abroad in order to sell abroad, but much of the hiring reflects offshored production for US markets.

The US has been able to survive the large trade deficits produced by jobs offshoring, because the US dollar is the world reserve currency. Being the world reserve currency, the US does not have to earn foreign currencies with exports in order to pay for its imports. However, as these trade deficits persist and the buildup of foreign holdings of dollar paper assets rises, there is a diminishing willingness of foreigners to trade real goods and services for financial assets denominated in a fiat currency whose value is diminishing with the ever-growing supply.

Thus, the basic notion of globalism–that a country’s corporations can produce goods and services in any country for home markets–is false.

Walsh is correct that China is not to blame for the decline in US manufacturing. Offshoring is to blame, and, thus, the blame lies with US corporations, policymakers, and the economists and financial media who shill for “globalism.” The decision was made to sacrifice the US economy to the short-term profits of the few. A country so poorly led can do nothing but decline.

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

Counterproductive Minimum Wage Mandates

Working for wages has never been the path for significant wealth. Most people are not equipped nor do they have the inclination to be engaged in business endeavors that will earn them a viable living. The reluctance that most workers bring to their occupation stems from their inability or unwillingness of properly understanding the related components that are essential in creating wealth. While many view work as a curse, the indispensable reconciliation for a practical and tolerable acceptance of universal plight is that no one is owed a living.

In a world of Totalitarian Collectivism, the powers that control international economies, seek to pacify the laboring hordes with crumbs from substandard minimum wage mandates. The foolishness that guarantees minimal scale for hourly toil can and will never produce a prosperous society. The entire economic interdependent scheme to destroy the last vestiges of a bona fide “free market” economy is at the heart of minimum wage mandates.Corporatists love higher minimum wage increases because small business is least equipped to absorb added costs in their operations. Corporatists are in the business of monopoly formation. Competition is a cardinal sin to the globalists. Any governmental imposition that creates added strain on the very viability of potential contenders, eagerly sought by crony capitalism, is destructive to labor.

Wall Street conglomerates intentionally hire few people, when compared to the total work force. The trend to slot part time positions with modest or no benefits or contract employees is the new model. This framework offers little opportunity for the unskilled or first time job seeker.

BalancePolitics.org offers reasons pro and con about minimum wage.

 

Abolish Minimum Wage Mandates

Keep Minimum Wage Mandates

1. The vast majority of economists believe the minimum wage lawcosts the economy thousands of jobs.2. Teenagers, workers intraining, college students, interns, and part-time workers all have their options and opportunities limited by the minimum wage. 3. A low-paying job remains an entry point for those with few marketable skills. 4. Abolishing the minimum wage will allow businesses to achieve greater efficiency and lower prices. 5. When you force American companies to pay a certain wage, you increase the likelihood that those companies will outsource jobs to foreign workers, where labor is much cheaper. 6. Non-profit charitable organizations are hurt by the minimum wage. 7. The minimum wage can drive some small companies out of business. 8. A minimum wage gives businesses an additional incentive to mechanize duties previously held by humans. 9. Cost-of-living differences in various areas of the country make a universal minimum wage difficult to set. 10. Elimination of the minimum wage would mean more citizens and fewer illegals would be hired for low-pay hourly jobs, leading to greater tax revenues and less incentive for illegal immigration.11. The minimum wage creates a competitive advantage for foreign companies, providing yet another obstacle in the ability of American companies to compete globally. 12. The minimum wage law is just another example of government condescendingly controlling our actions and destroying personal choice. Citizens do have the ability to say no to a lower wage.

1. Adults who currently work for minimum wage are likely to lose jobs to teenagers who will work for much less. 2. Workers need a minimum amount of income from their work to survive and pay the bills. 3. Businesses have more power to abuse the labor market. 4. It forces businesses toshare some of the vastwealth with the people that help produce it.

 

The motivation to impose minimum wage conditions for employment is to control the workforce. Helping the downtrodden is a myth or an outright lie. Functioning businesses must be able to balance their books to survive. Employing productive labor translates into paying a scale that benefits both the business and the worker. In the age of systemic social welfare, it is insulting to claim that minimum wage laws grow the economy or increases labor opportunities.

Talk Of Liberty, in Abolish Minimum Wage makes the point:

“If you make minimum wage, most likely you are on government housing, food stamps, Medicaid, fuel assistance and all the other government goodies. My point is if this is the group you are worried about, you shouldn’t. That is the point of this countries welfare system. This is where the Liberals want to have their cake and eat it to. Get rid of welfare and its massive costs if you want higher wage laws, get rid of welfare.”

The proper way to hasten a true domestic economic revival is to adopt a “right to work” policy that allows independent businesses to hire people based upon the free exchange and responsibilities of agreed remunerations. Without profitable incentives and relief that small business can secure, taking the risk of employing additional “hired help” is purely academic.

Thomas Rustici, in his scholarly Cato paper, A PUBLIC CHOICE VIEW OF THE MINIMUM WAGE, identifies the nature of the impasse to achieving free markets.

“Before one can hope for the abolition of the minimum wage, the influence of the well-organized, special-interest groups that receive the bulk of the benefits from it must be reduced. There is, however, little chance that such groups as Northern unions and businesses, or interest groups in general, could be barred from the political process in the near future.”

The problem with any acceptance of government imposition of compulsory wage scales into private employment negotiations destroys opportunities for employees. A job presupposes that a business has a reason to hire added help and can afford the costs of a day’s pay for a day’s work.

A socialized economy inevitably ensures a stagnate workforce. People need to be encouraged to learn the skills that small business demands as the basis for injecting worth and value in order to earn a paycheck.

The answer to the Corporatists/State oppressive economic stranglehold is a workable free market of exchange, barter and consensual business relationships. Liberate your thinking before you can fatten your pocketbook.

Off His Onion

Iran is a great country for kebab; their pretty if well-covered girls are fine; but sense of humour is just not their forte. Their state media repeatedly broadcasted items lifted from the Onion, a satirical magazine taking them for literal truth. The Onion ran a story about American farmers who would rather have a drink with Ahmadinejad than with Obama, and their Fars news agency duly reprinted it. The Onion faked an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, and Iranian state-owned Press TV took it for a real thing.

And now, a new faux-pas. The same Iranian state-owned Press TV published an attack on Julian Assange with a bombastic claim: “Exclusive: Assange-Mossad ties unveiled”. A brief check shows an identical piece appeared onThe Veterans Today site. Both pieces are identical, both “exclusive” and both written by the same person, a Gordon Duff, wearing two hats, that of “the chief editor of VT” and that of a “columnist of Press TV”. Oy, it would be better to stick to the Onion.

Not only it is not “exclusive”, there is no “revelation” either. In his column, Duff claims that “Assange, an intelligence asset of Israel, as Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out on December 2, 2010 on National Public Radio in an interview with Judy Woodruff, one tasked with supplying a platform for Israeli intelligence to insert carefully crafted “pointed intelligence” wrapped in “Wikileaks.” A very strong claim! Who would know better than Zbigniew Brzezinski, whether Assange is an intelligence asset or not? If he says so, it is certainly true. But alas, it is not so. In the interview, or anywhere else, or on any other occasion Zbigniew Brzezinski did not say anything similar about Julian Assange.

So, does Duff brazenly lie? No, he cheats the reader. Brzezinski explained what is “intelligence asset”, and Duff built the sentence so a careless reader would think Brzezinski related to Assange. Crafty trick! He could say: Assange, a vile paedophile, as the head of London police said, one who lusts after small children, and we would think that the Head of Scotland Yard confirmed criminality of Assange. He should be a lawyer, this Duff, and make good money.

The centrepiece is the absurd claim that by accusing President Obama of seeking to exploit the Arab spring revolutions for political gain, Assange “supported Romney, just like Netanyahu”. This is too silly even for the Onion! Julian Assange called upon Obama   to cease persecution of Wikileaks and of Sergeant Manning, and he said that Obama’s vocal support for freedom of expression had not been translated into action. All that is true: Obama was and is a big disappointment for his voters. He uses drones to kill people more often than any US president. He used and derailed the Arab Spring for the imperial benefit. He was beastly to the Wikileaks. But nothing whatsoever would justify Duff’s daffy assertion that “along with Netanyahu, Assange has tried to insert his way into the American election on the side of a losing candidate whose platform is simply war with Iran.”

He could say the same about any critic of Obama, including theCounterpunch late co-editor Alex Cockburn. Duff goes on: “this week, from his balcony at the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange unleashed his program, carefully coordinated with the world’s druglords, his “bankster” friends and, closest of all, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, his strongest supporter, one to interfere in the American election on behalf of Mitt Romney.” Is there any basis for this wild accusation? None whatsoever. Neither druglords, nor banksters nor Netanyahu neither Romney never expressed a single positive assessment of Julian, neither he of them. Probably Romney would kill Assange by now if he could, and so would bankers, as he published some Bank of America data.

Every line in this lengthy article is zanier than the preceding one. Duff writes: “We got to know Assange initially with his video of a US helicopter killing civilians in Iraq.  The problem is, of course, Assange supported the war in Iraq, supported a US attack on Iran for Iraq (whatever this means – ISH), supported war with Pakistan, supports US interference in Syria and, where he stands apart from most well informed people of the world, is a lead figure in suppressing an investigation of 9/11.”

Duff forgot to mention that Assange started World War One and World War Two, supported the Inquisition and is a leading figure behind the global warming (or cooling, or both). For the sake of innocent readers who just now hatched from an egg in rural Kentucky, let it be added, that Assange was and is strongly anti-war, and his publications were instrumental in recognising the sheer criminality of the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

“Assange, living as a princeling for years” – he writes of a man who is locked up for two years for no crime and who hardly had had money for a bus ride. “Assange is a pure Islamophobe” – no reasons given, but believe Duff, he knows. Or even better one: “Julian Assange is the darling of Europe’s ultra-nationalists and “anti-immigration” crowd, seemingly a genetic twin to Andrew Breveik, the Norwegian mass murderer who killed 77 children of party members who supported the Israeli boycott.” Any proof? A quote from Julian, or a quote from Breivik, or at least a quote from “anti-immigration crowd”? Expectedly, none whatsoever. Assange is very far removed from all the nationalist scene, he never was interested in them, or they in him. I do not know why Duff failed to mention that Assange is Jack the Ripper.

Here is another daffy assertion: “When, back in early 2011, it was exposed to the world that all Wikileaks were filtered through Israel and then the “pop culture” mainstream media before release, meaning there is no more censored source of information than Wikileaks, he fell from grace.” Was it exposed? By whom, I pray? From whose grace Julian fell? Actually, I know the answer. It is Duff, who wrote that Wikileaks work from Israel. And then, I presume, Julian fell from grace with Duff’s readers. Was there any basis for it? Again, for the same Kentucky’s chicken benefit, none whatsoever. Julian Assange did not write the cables: the US diplomats did. As I explained on the Counterpunch site, the State Department cables are not overtly critical to Israel, for the US diplomats know that it would jeopardise their career.

One can go on forever, for every single sentence in the lengthy article is a sheer lie and baseless invention. So it was a year ago, and two years ago; as long as I am aware of Mr Duff’s daffy writing. As a man who professionally works on the very edge of the loonies’ cyberspace, I know of him, of his ilk and of his readers. They are mainly the guys who see the Mossad behind everything, including sunset and sunrise. They are the softest target for cheating, Duff style. Just tell them “It is Mossad”, and they will ask no questions. Tell them Ahmadinejad or Putin is a Jew, they would never doubt it.

I am rather fond of the loonies and almost-loonies: they are seeking answers, and it is not their fault that they can’t find them. It does not matter for me what makes Mr Duff tick. Is it a result of his many wounds and contusions acquired during his military service, or is it his innate daffiness, or his friendship with some Pakistani intelligence officers, or does he cover the loony edge for the careful CIA operators who think that even the loonies should be infected with hate to Julian Assange like the feminists were thanks to Anna Ardin and the Jews thanks to the Private Eye? Who knows, who cares…

It never occurred to me to debunk his nonsense, like one does not debunk Grey Aliens and Lizards. So why now?

It is because Iran should be taken seriously, and it should take itself seriously. Whether they want to have a nuclear weapon or not, if such a possibility is ever been pondered, they should watch over what they say and over what their state media reports. Judging by this publication, Iranians profoundly failed, and this failure is worse than one of Siemens booby-trapped equipment. Their discourse can’t rely upon the Onion nor upon those who are gone off their onion.

How Do You Take Your Poison?

We will all swallow our cup of corporate poison. We can take it from nurse Romney, who will tell us not to whine and play the victim, or we can take it from nurse Obama, who will assure us that this hurts him even more than it hurts us, but one way or another the corporate hemlock will be shoved down our throats. The choice before us is how it will be administered. Corporate power, no matter who is running the ward after January 2013, is poised to carry out U.S. history’s most savage assault against the poor and the working class, not to mention the Earth’s ecosystem. And no one in power, no matter what the bedside manner, has any intention or ability to stop it.

If you insist on participating in the cash-drenched charade of a two-party democratic election at least be clear about what you are doing. You are, by playing your assigned role as the Democratic or Republican voter in this political theater, giving legitimacy to a corporate agenda that means your own impoverishment and disempowerment. All the things that stand between us and utter destitution—Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants, Head Start, Social Security, public education, federal grants-in-aid to America’s states and cities, the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and home-delivered meals for seniors—are about to be shredded by the corporate state. Our corporate oligarchs are harvesting the nation, grabbing as much as they can, as fast as they can, in the inevitable descent.

We will be assaulted this January when automatic spending reductions, referred to as “the fiscal cliff,” begin to dismantle and defund some of our most important government programs. Mitt Romney will not stop it. Barack Obama will not stop it.

And while Romney has been, courtesy of the magazine Mother Jones, exposed as a shallow hypocrite, Obama is in a class by himself. There is hardly a campaign promise from 2008 that Obama has not broken. This list includes his pledges to support the public option in health care, close Guantanamo, raise the minimum wage, regulate Wall Street, support labor unions in their struggles with employers, reform the Patriot Act, negotiate an equitable peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, curb our imperial expansion in the Middle East, stop torture, protect reproductive rights, carry out a comprehensive immigration reform, cut the deficit by half, create 5 million new energy jobs and halt home foreclosures. Obama, campaigning in South Carolina in 2007, said that as president he would fight for the right of collective bargaining. “I’d put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll … walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America,” he said. But when he got his chance to put on those “comfortable pair of shoes” during labor disputes in Madison, Wis., and Chicago he turned his back on working men and women.

Obama, while promising to defend Social Security, also says he stands behind the planned cuts outlined by his deficit commission, headed by Morgan Stanley board member Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson, a Wyoming Republican. The Bowles-Simpson plan calls for cutting 0.3 percentage points from the annual cost-of-living adjustment in the Social Security program. The annual reduction would slowly accumulate. After a decade it would mean a 3 percent cut. After two decades it would mean a 6 percent cut. The retirement age would be raised to 69. And those on Social Security who continued to work and made more than $40,000 a year would be penalized with further reductions. Obama’s payroll tax cuts have, at the same time, served to undermine the solvency of Social Security, making it an easier target for the finance corporations that seek to destroy the program and privatize the funds.

But that is just the start. Cities and states are frantically staving off collapse. They cannot pay for most pension plans and are borrowing at higher and higher interest rates to keep themselves afloat. The country’s 19,000 municipalities face steadily declining or stagnant property tax revenues, along with spiraling costs. Annual pension payments for state and local plans more than doubled to 15.7 percent of payrolls in 2011 from 6.4 percent a decade ago, according to a study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. And local governments, which made some $50 billion in pension contributions in 2010, face unfunded pension liabilities of $3 trillion and unfunded health benefit liabilities of more than $1 trillion, according to The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. State and local government spending fell at a rate of 2.1 percent in the second quarter of this year, according to the Commerce Department. It was the 11th consecutive quarterly reduction in expenditures. And in the past year alone local governments cut 66,000 jobs, mostly those of teachers and other school employees, reported The Wall Street Journal, which accumulated this list of grim statistics.

The costs of our most basic needs, from food to education to health care, are at the same time being pushed upward with no control or regulation. Tuition and fees at four-year colleges climbed 300 percent between 1990 and 2011, fueling the college loan crisis that has left graduates, most of them underemployed or unemployed, with more than $1 trillion in debt. Health care costs over the same period have risen 150 percent. Food prices have climbed 10 percent since June, according to the World Bank. There are now 46.7 million U.S. citizens, and one in three children, who depend on food stamps. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency under Obama has, meanwhile, expelled 1.5 million immigrants, a number that dwarfs deportations carried out by his Republican predecessor. And while we are being fleeced, the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Bank has since 2008 doled out $16 trillion to national and global financial institutions and corporations.

Fiscal implosion is only a matter of time. And the corporate state is preparing. Obama’s assault on civil liberties has outpaced that of George W. Bush. The refusal to restore habeas corpus, the use of the Authorization to Use Military Force Act to justify the assassination of U.S. citizens, the passing of the FISA Amendments Act to monitor and eavesdrop on tens of millions of citizens without a warrant, the employment of the Espionage Act six times to threaten whistle-blowers inside the government with prison time, and the administration’s recent emergency appeal of U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest’s permanent injunction of Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act give you a hint of the shackles the Democrats, as well as the Republicans, intend to place on all those who contemplate dissent.

But perhaps the most egregious assault will be carried out by the fossil fuel industry. Obama, who presided over the repudiation of the Kyoto Accords and has done nothing to halt the emission of greenhouse gases, reversed 20 years of federal policy when he permitted the expansion of fracking and offshore drilling. And this acquiescence to big oil and big coal, no doubt useful in bringing in campaign funds, spells disaster for the planet. He has authorized drilling in federally protected lands, along the East Coast, Alaska and four miles off Florida’s Atlantic beaches. Candidate Obama in 2008 stood on the Florida coastline and vowed never to permit drilling there.

You get the point. Obama is not in charge. Romney would not be in charge. Politicians are the public face of corporate power. They are corporate employees. Their personal narratives, their promises, their rhetoric and their idiosyncrasies are meaningless. And that, perhaps, is why the cost of the two presidential campaigns is estimated to reach an obscene $2.5 billion. The corporate state does not produce a product that is different. It produces brands that are different. And brands cost a lot of money to sell.

You can dismiss those of us who will in protest vote for a third-party candidate and invest our time and energy in acts of civil disobedience. You can pride yourself on being practical. You can swallow the false argument of the lesser of two evils. But ask yourself, once this nightmare starts kicking in, who the real sucker is.

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

Source:  Chris Hedges | Truth Dig

Failed Presidency: Two Ways To Conquer A Nation – Sword or Debt

Thirty-five years ago, the United States of America enjoyed being the greatest creditor nation in the world.  In 2012, we languish at $16 trillion in debt and going deeper by the minute.  We have become the largest debtor nation in history.  We borrow $2 billion daily to float our bloated and inefficient government.

We provide free money for millions who sit on their butts 24/7.  We pay millions to have babies, tap into free food at schools, free medical care and we pay for their housing—all on taxpayers’ backs.  We suffer 13.4 million children living in poverty.  We pay for an ongoing and useless war in Afghanistan at over $10 billion every 30 days.  Over 46.9 million Americans ride food stamps for a living.  Electronic Benefits Transfers allow millions of single mothers to live on the dole as long as they keep birthing babies.

All our debt, all our unemployables, all our welfare recipients, all our illiterate and downtrodden citizens can only lead to one final outcome—ultimate collapse.

“There are two ways to conquer & enslave a nation.

One is by the sword.

The other is by debt.”  John Adams  1826

One of the Founding Fathers, John Adams said it best.  Alexander Hamilton said much the same thing.  You cannot continue adding to your debt whether you are a person or a government.  You will have to pay the Piper at some point.  Your deck of cards will fall.  Ask any of the millions of Americans who suffered foreclosures in the past three years.  Ask any of the hundreds of thousands of personal bankruptcies across America.

Four years ago, a young and inept U.S. Senator named Barack Obama made the following statement in March of 2006:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government cannot pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that, “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

President Barack Obama added $3 trillion to our federal debt within 3.5 years of his administration.  He maintained two wars at $12 billion monthly.  He continued 8 to 9 percent unemployment.  He failed to reform and repair illegal immigration that costs taxpayers $346 billion annually across 15 federal agencies. (Source: Edwin Rubenstein “Costs of illegal immigration”  www.TheSocialContract.com ) He failed to reform “free trade” to “fair trade” that siphons $700 billion annually in trade deficits.

During his four years in office, Obama failed American taxpayers, American workers and the American way of life.

During his four years in office, the “buck didn’t stop here.”  It didn’t stop at all.  As shown in his foreign policy blunders, Obama resembles a 6 foot man who can’t swim who fell into a 12 foot swimming pool with no lifeguard on duty.

Unfortunately, we American citizens pay the freight. We pay the interest on $16 trillion each day.  How much do we pay for all that borrowed money every day?  Answer: $500 million a day or total of $189 billion annually.  That  amount doesn’t begin to pay down the debt. (Source: www.defeatthedebt.com )

Who failed us?  First of all, our U.S. Congress failed us because it acts like a teenager with an unlimited credit card.  Obama failed us because as the head “parent” who writes the paychecks, he never stopped Congress, but in fact—added to the debt by reckless spending.

We need a president who understands finances. We need a president who understands how to operate an entire budget process for our government. We need a leader who will bring our spending in line with our taxes.

Otherwise, John Adams will prove a prophet of our demise as a civilization.

“There are two ways to conquer & enslave a nation.

One is by the sword.

The other is by debt.”  John Adams  1826

L’Affaire Assange

“We pledge allegiance to the republic for which America stands and not to its empire for which it is now suffering.” ¹

Louis XVI needed a revolution, Napoleon needed two historic military defeats, the Spanish Empire in the New World needed multiple revolutions, the Russian Czar needed a communist revolution, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires needed World War I, the Third Reich needed World War II, the Land of the Rising Sun needed two atomic bombs, the Portuguese Empire in Africa needed a military coup at home. What will the American Empire need?

Perhaps losing the long-held admiration and support of one group of people after another, one country after another, as the empire’s wars, bombings, occupations, torture, and lies eat away at the facade of a beloved and legendary “America”; an empire unlike any other in history, that has intervened seriously and grievously, in war and in peace, in most countries on the planet, as it preached to the world that the American Way of Life was a shining example for all humanity and that America above all was needed to lead the world.

The Wikileaks documents and videos have provided one humiliation after another … lies exposed, political manipulations revealed, gross hypocrisies, murders in cold blood, … followed by the torture of Bradley Manning and the persecution of Julian Assange. Washington calls the revelations “threats to national security”, but the world can well see it’s simply plain old embarrassment. Manning’s defense attorneys have asked the military court on several occasions to specify the exact harm done to national security. The court has never given an answer. If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, consider an empire embarrassed.

And we now have the international soap opera, L’Affaire Assange, starring Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, Ecuador, and Julian Assange. The United States’ neo-colonies of Sweden (an active warring member of NATO in all but name) and the United Kingdom (with its “special relationship” to the United States) know what is expected of them to earn a pat on the head from their Washington uncle. We can infer that Sweden has no legitimate reason to demand the extradition of Julian Assange from London from the fact that it has repeatedly refused offers to question Assange in the UK and repeatedly refused to explain why it has refused to do so.

The Brits, under “immense pressure from the Obama administration”, as reported to former British ambassador Craig Murray by the UK Foreign Office,² threatened, in a letter to the Ecuadoran government, to raid the Ecuadoran embassy in London to snatch Assange — “[You] should be aware that there is a legal basis in the United Kingdom, the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act of 1987, which would allow us to take action to arrest Mr. Assange in the existing facilities of the embassy”. Over the August 18 weekend the London police actually made their way into the building’s internal fire escape, coming within a few feet of Assange’s room, as he could hear. The law cited by the Brits is, of course, their own law, one not necessarily with any international standing.

The UK has now formally withdrawn its threat against the embassy, probably the result of much international indignation toward Her Majesty’s Government. The worldwide asylum system would fall apart if the nation granting the asylum were punished for it. In this violent world of terrorists, imperialists, and other dreadfuls it’s comforting to know that an old fashioned value like political asylum can still be honored.

A look back at some US and UK behavior in regard to embassies and political asylum is both interesting and revealing:

In 1954, when the United States overthrew the democratically-elected social democrat Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and replaced him with a military government headed by Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, many Guatemalans took refuge in foreign embassies. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles insisted that the new Guatemalan government raid those embassies and arrest those individuals, whom he referred to as “communists”. But Castillo Armas refused to accede to Dulles’ wishes on this issue. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, in their comprehensive history of the coup,³ state:

“In the end, Castillo Armas disregarded Dulles’ suggestions. He himself was a product of the widespread belief in Latin America that embassy asylum and safe-conduct passes were a fair resolution to political conflicts. Virtually every politically active Guatemalan, including Castillo Armas, had sought political asylum in an embassy at one time or another and had obtained safe conduct from the government. Dulles’ suggestion for a ‘modification’ of the asylum doctrine was not even popular within the American Embassy.”

It should be noted that one of those who sought asylum in the Argentine Embassy in Guatemala was a 25-year-old Argentine doctor named Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who is one of Assange’s lawyers, came to international attention in 1998 when he indicted former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet while he was in England. But the British declined to send Pinochet to Spain to face the indictment, in effect giving him political asylum, and allowed this proverbial mass murderer and torturer to walk free and eventually return to Chile. Julian Assange, not charged or found guilty of anything, is a de facto prisoner of the UK; while the New York Times and the BBC and the numerous other media giants, who did just what Assange did by publishing Wikileaks articles and broadcasting Wikileaks videos, walk free.

This past April, Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng escaped house arrest in China and took refuge at the American Embassy in Beijing, sparking diplomatic tension between the two countries. But the “authoritarian” Chinese government did not threaten to enter the American Embassy to arrest Chen and soon allowed him to accept an American offer of safe passage to US soil. How will Julian Assange ever obtain safe passage to Ecuador?

In August 1989, while the Cold War still prevailed many East Germans crossed into fellow-Soviet-bloc state Czechoslovakia and were granted political asylum in the West German embassy. How would the United States — which has not said a word against the British threat to invade the Ecuadoran embassy — have reacted if the East Germans or the Czechs had raided the West German embassy or blocked the East Germans from leaving it? As matters turned out, West Germany took the refugee-seekers to West Germany by train without being impeded by the Soviet bloc. A few months later, the weaker “Evil Empire” collapsed, leaving the entire playing field, known as the world, to the stronger “Evil Empire”, which has been on belligerence autopilot ever since.

In 1986, after the French government refused the use of its air space to US warplanes headed for a bombing raid on Libya, the planes were forced to take another, longer route. When they reached Libya they bombed so close to the French embassy that the building was damaged and all communication links were disabled.⁴

In 1999, NATO (aka the USA), purposely (sic) bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.⁵

After Assange took refuge in the Ecuadoran embassy and was granted asylum by the South American country, the US State Department declared: “The United States is not a party to the 1954 OAS [Organization of American States] Convention on Diplomatic Asylum and does not recognize the concept of diplomatic asylum as a matter of international law.”⁶

Ecuador called for a meeting at the OAS of the foreign ministers of member countries to discuss the whole situation. The United States opposed the request. For Washington the issue was simple: The UK obeys international law and extradites Assange to Sweden. (And then, chuckle-chuckle, Sweden sends the bastard to us.) End of discussion. Washington did not want the issue blown up and prolonged any further. But of the 26 nations voting at the OAS only three voted against the meeting: The US, Canada, and Trinidad & Tobago; perhaps another example of what was mentioned above about a dying empire losing the long-held admiration and support of one country after another.

The price Ecuador may pay for its courage … Washington Post editorial, June 20, 2012:

“There is one potential check on [Ecuadoran president Rafael] Correa’s ambitions. The U.S. ‘empire’ he professes to despise happens to grant Ecuador (which uses the dollar as its currency) special trade preferences that allow it to export many goods duty-free. A full third of Ecuadoran foreign sales ($10 billion in 2011) go to the United States, supporting some 400,000 jobs in a country of 14 million people. Those preferences come up for renewal by Congress early next year. If Mr. Correa seeks to appoint himself America’s chief Latin American enemy and Julian Assange’s protector between now and then, it’s not hard to imagine the outcome.”

On several occasions President Obama, when pressed to investigate Bush and Cheney for war crimes, has declared: “I prefer to look forward rather than backwards”. Picture a defendant before a judge asking to be found innocent on such grounds. It simply makes laws, law enforcement, crime, justice, and facts irrelevant. Picture Julian Assange before a military court in Virginia using this argument. Picture the reaction to this by Barack Obama, who has become the leading persecutor of whistleblowers in American history.

Since L’Affaire Assange captured world headlines the United States, as well as the United Kingdom, have on several occasions made statements about the deep-seated international obligation of nations to honor extradition requests from other nations. The United States, however, has a history of ignoring such requests, whether made formally or informally, for persons living in the US who are ideological allies. Here’s a partial sample from recent years:

• Former Venezuelan president Carlos Andres Perez, whom the Venezuelan government demanded be turned over to stand trial for his role in suppressing riots in 1989. He died in 2010 in Miami. (Associated Press, December 27, 2010)
• Former Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada fled to the United States in 2003 to avoid a trial for the death of about 60 people in La Paz during a military crackdown on demonstrators. In 2008, Bolivia formally served the US government with a request to extradite him back to Bolivia, which was not acceded to. (Associated Press, February 13, 2006; also see his Wikipedia entry)
• In 2010, a US federal judge denied Argentina’s extradition request for former military officer Roberto Bravo, who was facing 16 murder charges stemming from a 1972 massacre of leftist guerrillas in his homeland. (Associated Press, November 2, 2010)
• Luis Posada, a Cuban-born citizen of Venezuela, masterminded the bombing of a Cuban airline in 1976, killing 73 civilians. Inasmuch as part of the plotting took place in Venezuela, that government formally asked the United States for his extradition in 2005. But instead of extraditing him, the United States prosecuted him for minor immigration infractions that came to naught. Posada continues to live as a free man in the United States.
• In 2007 German prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 13 suspected CIA operatives who had abducted German citizen Khaled el-Masri in 2003 and flown him to Afghanistan for interrogation (read torture). The CIA then realized they had kidnapped the wrong man and dumped el-Masri on the side of an Albanian road. Subsequently, the German Justice Minster announced that she would no longer request extradition, citing US refusal to arrest or hand over the agents. (The Guardian (London), January 7, 2011)
• In November 2009 an Italian judge convicted a CIA Station Chief and 22 other Americans, all but one being CIA operatives, for kidnapping a Muslim cleric, Abu Omar, from the streets of Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt for the usual interrogation. All those convicted had left Italy by the time of the judge’s ruling and were thus tried in absentia. In Italy they are considered fugitives. Although there were verdicts, arrest warrants and extradition requests in the case, the Italian government refused to formally forward the requests to their close allies, the Americans; which, in any event, would of course have been futile. (Der Spiegel [Germany] online, December 17, 2010, based on a Wikileaks US cable)

The hidden, obvious, peculiar, fatal, omnipresent bias of American mainstream media concerning US foreign policy

There are more than 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States. Can you name a single paper, or a single TV network, that was unequivocally opposed to the American wars carried out against Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam? Or even opposed to any two of these wars? How about one? (I’ve been asking this question for years and so far I’ve gotten only one answer — Someone told me that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had unequivocally opposed the invasion of Iraq. Can anyone verify that or name another case?)

In 1968, six years into the Vietnam war, the Boston Globe surveyed the editorial positions of 39 leading US papers concerning the war and found that “none advocated a pull-out”.⁷

Now, can you name an American daily newspaper or TV network that more or less gives any support to any US government ODE (Officially Designated Enemy)? Like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Fidel or Raul Castro of Cuba, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Rafael Correa of Ecuador (even before the current Assange matter), or Evo Morales of Bolivia? I mean that presents the ODE’s point of view in a reasonably fair manner most of the time? Or any ODE of the recent past like Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Moammar Gaddafi of Libya, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, or Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti?

Who in the mainstream media supports Hamas of Gaza? Or Hezbollah of Lebanon?

Who in the mainstream media is outspokenly critical of Israel’s domestic or foreign policies? And keeps his/her job?

Who in the mainstream media treats Julian Assange or Bradley Manning as the heros they are?

And this same mainstream media tell us that Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, et al. do not have a real opposition media.

The ideology of the American mainstream media is the belief that they don’t have any ideology; they are instead what they call “objective”.

It’s been said that the political spectrum concerning US foreign policy in the America mainstream media “runs the gamut from A to B.”

Long before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of Russian writers touring the United States were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that almost all the opinions on all the vital issues were the same. “In our country,” said one of them, “to get that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you do it? What’s the secret?”⁸

On October 8, 2001, the second day of the US bombing of Afghanistan, the transmitters for the Taliban government’s Radio Shari were bombed and shortly after this the US bombed some 20 regional radio sites. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the targeting of these facilities, saying: “Naturally, they cannot be considered to be free media outlets. They are mouthpieces of the Taliban and those harboring terrorists.”⁹

Notes

1. Sam Smith, editor of the Progressive Review ^↩
2. Craig Murray, “America’s Vassal Acts Decisively and Illegally: Former UK Ambassador“, Information Clearing House, August 16, 2012 ^↩
3. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (1982), pp.222-3 ^↩
4. Associated Press, “France Confirms It Denied U.S. Jets Air Space, Says Embassy Damaged”,
   April 15, 1986 ^↩
5. William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, pp.308-9 ^↩
6. Josh Rogin, “State Department: The U.S. does not recognize the concept of ‘diplomatic asylum’”, Foreign Policy, August 17, 2012 ^↩
7. Boston Globe, February 18, 1968, p.2-A ^↩
8. John Pilger, New Statesman (London), February 19, 2001 ^↩
9. Index on Censorship (London), October 18, 2001 ^↩

10 Ugly Outcomes Few Know About Obama’s Amnesty For Illegal Alien Children

On the idealistic side, Barack Obama’s executive amnesty for 1.9 million children of illegal alien border crosses looks like a compassionate decision.  However, on the realistic side of the equation, American workers will be displaced by those 1.9 million additional workers.  But it doesn’t stop there.  It grows by leaps and bounds.

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, www.Fairus.org , asked Kristen Williamson to investigate the long term consequences.  She discovered the amnesty will cost billions of dollars to American taxpayers, workers and the economy itself.

Estimates range around $900 billion to give instant citizenship to this armada of illegal alien children to the age of 30.  They will be able to tap into food stamps, welfare, assisted housing, medical care and scholarships to higher education.  All the while, their parents are cheating our work laws, working at cash-payment jobs, cashing in on Income Tax Credit benefits, breaking our immigration laws and remain in our country in violation of our sovereignty.

“Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began accepting applications for deferred action through US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). FAIR has been closely tracking developments in President Obama’s executive amnesty since its announcement on June 15,” said Williamson.  “Below are some of the things you need to know about the President’s unilateral changes to U.S. immigration policy.”

1. President Obama’s amnesty will add nearly 2 million workers – possibly more – to the U.S. job market. This is a negligent economic and social policy with over 8% unemployment and half of recent young college graduates unemployed or underemployed.
2. Lax documentation requirements to prove eligibility. DHS application instructions explicitly state that only copies of documents will be required to meet the eligibility criteria for amnesty including length of presence in the U.S., education, and even identity. Also, illegal aliens will be able to submit any and all documents they deem relevant to prove their eligibility. Virtually any form of documentation will be accepted, from report cards and plane tickets to mere personal correspondence.
3. The Administration is making this up as they go along. In June, President Obama touted this policy as the “right thing to do” for some of the best and brightest. However, it is clear that the educational, residency and character requirements are becoming increasingly lax as more details about the implementation of the amnesty emerge.
4. No face-to-face interview required. Most applications will be approved based only on the documentation submitted.
5. Few safeguards against and limited consequences for filing fraudulent applications or documents. If DHS is actually diligent enough to identify fraud, the new amnesty instructions merely state that the Administration “may” elect to penalize illegal aliens by denying immigration benefits or placing them into removal proceedings. However, since illegal aliens are only required to submit copies – which lack identifiers of authenticity – it is unknown how USCIS employees will be able to identify fraud in the first place.
6. USCIS turns blind eye to past illegal employment. Illegal aliens may use employment records to show eligibility for amnesty despite the fact illegal aliens are barred from working in the U.S. Past employers of illegal alien applicants are not likely to face prosecution for hiring illegal aliens.
7. Family of deferred action recipients will also reap the benefits. Application instructions explicitly state that information collected on an illegal alien will not be used against him or her, or their “family members and guardians,” for the purpose of immigration enforcement.
8. Illegal aliens granted work authorization can obtain Social Security cards. Illegal aliens granted deferred action must apply for employment authorization if they present an “economic necessity.” Once received, DHS work authorization will allow them to apply for a Social Security Number and possibly other benefits like driver’s licenses.
9. Illegal aliens with a criminal history DO qualify. DHS says only felony and “serious misdemeanor” convictions will make illegal aliens ineligible for amnesty, and even then, convictions won’t necessarily be considered if they are expunged. Additionally, criminal convictions in foreign countries will go undetected and DHS will “exercise discretion” when considering juvenile records.
10. USCIS doesn’t have a great track record. Earlier this year, the DHS Inspector General found that USCIS leadership told employees to rubber-stamp applications for immigration benefits – including work authorization. In leaked documents to theAssociated Press, USCIS estimated that it will review 3,000 deferred action and work authorization applications daily, only increasing the pressure to overlook possible fraud and approve benefits quickly.

As you can see, Obama flies on a wing and a prayer, but the American taxpayer foots the bill.  This amnesty, which is unconstitutional and solves nothing, will go down as a huge boondoggle that usurped the American people and their demands to enforce immigration laws.

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