The Economy is Politics
The Republicans are already bragging about how they will take back the house and how that will allow them to have hearings on everybody and everything that the Democrats have touched. That would be a good thing if the object were to make sure the Democrats were running the country correctly but that’s not the reason the Right is looking forward to having this subpoena power. What they are really looking to do is create the same kind of gridlock that they accomplished during Clinton’s second term. That’s when they wasted four years of the country’s progress in order to try and show that Clinton and his people were corrupt. The only thing they proved was that he was horny and from later revelations across the board, it seems the same is true for most politicians.
But is that kind of grid-lock what the country needs right now? Is the only thing the Republicans have to offer another version of their current policy of “No”?
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Frustration with the economy is the leading element in the country’s current antipathy toward their government. This is as it should be. There is nothing more important to a family than being able to feed and house itself. Washington can’t ignore this frustration and they know it but so far they have not been able to solve the problem. The Republicans are claiming that Obama owns the problem and to a great extent they are right. He is the president and so he owns all the problems that the country faces. But he didn’t create the problem so he shouldn’t be blamed for its existence only for its continuity. The people who should be blamed for its existence are the same people who are now trying to block Obama’s efforts to solve the problem. Why, because they don’t want him to succeed… at anything. They don’t care how much the country suffers as long as Obama fails. This is the same situation that prevailed during Clinton’s second term. That led to Bush & Cheney getting into the White House for eight years of lies, inefficiency and general screw-ups.
The background is simple. Eight years of Bush policies promulgated two bad wars, unregulated chaos in banking, real estate and Wall Street, along with errant tax policies which led to economic collapse and mass unemployment. That’s what Obama found when he walked into the White House. On January 20th 2009 what had been Bush’s problem, became Bush’s legacy. It was now Obama’s problem and he set about to solve it… along with health care, which had been ignored by a list of previous presidents long enough to fill a page.
The problem of the economy had to be solved fast because some of the biggest pieces of the economy, many of which had created the collapse, were about to crash and burn, dragging the rest of the economy down with them. Bush had seen this coming and so had created Tarp but it was too little to late. Obama wanted to stop the bleeding, and the only way that seemed logical was to give transfusions
where they were most needed and so he pushed through the Stimulus package. The object was to accomplish two things. One to give industry and Wall Street a shot in the arm with funds that would keep them operating until they got their balance back. The second was to give individuals the same shot by supporting salaries for essential workers who would otherwise be laid off and by extending unemployment for those who lost their jobs. This worked but as soon as it passed, without the help of one Republican, the Republicans discovered the national debt, something they had ignored for the last eight years. They began screaming that we had to reduce it and that the only way to do that was to cut taxes and cut programs like the Stimulus. Of course when they are asked what programs should be cut they can never come up with an answer. That was proved on recent weekends when Cornyn, Sessions and Boehner all drew blanks when asked that specific question.
Of course at this point the Stimulus has worked. It hasn’t eliminated unemployment but it has certainly stopped its rise. Yes, it went higher than Obama thought it would but without the Stimulus it could have crashed to the 35% levels of the Great Depression. A good part of the Stimulus money has been paid back by Wall Street and its temporary injection indeed helped keep companies like AIG and Goldman Sachs and GM in business, so stopping the disaster bred by the Bush administration has not bankrupted the American people. But that still leaves the big problem: what to do about the economy.
Going back to the economy of 2008 is impossible. We were in a binge spending cycle but the binge has ended. Current policy wants to get people to start spending again but that is, I think, unrealistic. They have been terrified by the recession and are exhausted by the constant fluctuating predictions and arguments. Giving them tax breaks will not accomplish spending. Tax breaks will be used for savings and paying down personal debt so no matter what we do now consumption will stay low. That means that another way to stimulate the economy must be found. That way is employment, getting people off the dole and getting them back to work.
To do that we need a long-term strategy based on employment rather than consumption. Our infrastructure is in a shambles, our roads are falling apart, our bridges are falling down, our water is getting less and less potable, our power grid no longer supports the needs of the country, our energy is being created by the wrong fuels, our high speed rail is almost non-existent, our broadband is in desperate need of expansion and we need money for higher education and technical training to support all these services as well as blue collar workers to build them.
Regardless of what the Republicans contend, the Stimulus worked. It stopped the economic free fall and stabilized the economy. What it hasn’t done is help the economy recover. For that we need to invest in our infrastructure and the new technologies being created in the fight against global warming. The banks and Wall Street have the money to do that but instead of lending the Stimulus money they were given to create jobs and spur the economy, they sat on it and created outrageous bonuses for their employees, proving that they haven’t learned anything and are still nothing but a bunch of greedy slobs who desperately needed the recently passed regulations and more. Despite their self serving, thoughtless actions they and the Republicans were surprised and bent out of shape when Obama forced said regulations down their throats in hopes that they could be restrained from gambling away the country’s future.
So even though tax -payers dollars bailed out Wall Street and big industry they aren’t willing to help get the country’s workers back on the job. Banks won’t lend to small businesses, the biggest creators of jobs in the economy. Wall Street won’t back new industries that will create new employment and help solve the ecological problems that the world is facing because these big time entrepreneurs who are supposed to be leading our country’s recovery are wetting their cowardly pants and blaming it on not knowing what taxes they will have to pay in the coming months. This is pure BS. The difference between profit and loss is never taxes because you don’t pay taxes until you have profit. Taxes account for the difference between profit and huge profit and the greedy bastards of the business community refuse to be satisfied with a decent profit. They want a huge profit even if it means that others have to go without.
So where does that leave us? With the only solution that the Republican’s say they hate. Government spending. A new Stimulus package, which will fund infrastructure programs that will create instant work. A new Stimulus package will fund industries that will build the products of the 22nd century, products that will hasten the elimination of the use of fossil fuels, empower the expansion of broadband and allow for a huge expansion of mass transit. By fueling these industries we will be accomplishing three things. We will be creating work for our unemployed, we will be creating industries that can supply not only us, but the whole world, and thereby increasing our share of worldwide business and we will be helping to thwart the impending global warming disaster. I know, the shamans of the Right say there is no global warming happening but the real scientists assure us that there is. Who ya gonna believe the scientists or the faith mongers?
So what’s the big problem? What is holding us back from pursuing this path? If we don’t build solar panels the rest of the world will and instead of manufacturing windmills in Colorado someone will be manufacturing them in Beijing and that goes for every single product of the new economy, and all the jobs will be filled by people who don’t live in the United States. But still the Republicans, who never worried about increasing the debt when they were in office, are screaming about bankrupting our children’s future. If we don’t spend the money now, if we don’t buy our way out of this economic disaster created by the Republicans, our children won’t have a future to bankrupt. We need to spend money now and if the private sector won’t finance this expansion of new technology the government has to. I’m not saying the government has to go into the technology business. What I’m saying is that the government has to finance companies that will.
How would that work? The same way the banks are not making it work now. The government would give the low interest loans that the banks aren’t, to businesses that want to create manufacturing jobs in new technologies. Sure some of them will fail. Some business always fail but many of them will succeed, just like in real life and those that do succeed will make up for the losses of those that fail just the way they do in any successful economy. But the money has to come from someplace and that place will have to be in the form of a second Stimulus package. Many people are against this, terrified of increasing the deficit, but if increasing the deficit now when interest rates are as low as they are ever going to get, helps create jobs then that is an increase that will pay itself back. There will never be a better time for the government to borrow money than now.
So who is against this, who is telling people to be afraid of increasing the deficit despite the advantages of doing it now? The Republicans. Why? Because the Republicans have no agenda of their own, no solution to the unemployment problem they created, and the only hope they have of ever getting elected anything more than dog catcher is to have Obama fail. Of course if Obama fails, the country fails but they don’t care about that. They don’t care about the guy who lost his job, feeding his kids. They have and have had only one objective since Barak Obama took office. They want Barak Obama to fail. That is the most disgustingly un-American position any group of politicians have ever held in the history of the nation..
Bits and Pieces
I just don’t get these intrusive bigots who have nothing to do but go around trying to keep people from getting married. Acquire a life! What difference does it make if the couple is of the same or different sexes? They love each other and want to live together. Marriage, whether between different sexes or the same sex is a legal & symbolic institution. Who are they hurting? More to the point, what business is it of these clowns and how does it affect their small lives? Maybe if they had half a brain they’d be worried about something important like all the people who are out of work or what we are doing to our environment. It constantly amazes me, just how stupid a large segment of my fellow American’s really are.
Strictly NYC: Big deal going on about people having garages in their private houses. Why? The city is against it when it should be for it. It gets cars off the street and it raises building values creating higher property taxes. Mr. Mayor, you understand economics even if the dummies who make up your bureaucracy don’t. Tell them to back off.
And speaking of the Mayor. His latest speech, the one in favor of allowing the mosque to be built near the World Trade center is surely correct. It should be anyone’s right to build wherever they want as long as they do it legally. That’s the beauty of this country. I think Muslims have a perfect right to build their mosque where they want it. What they don’t have, what they haven’t displayed for even a second in making this decision, is a spec of sensitivity. This is a glaringly stupid decision that will brand even moderate Muslims, which I am led to believe are the ones trying to build the center, as insensitive hate mongers. German officials in Hamburg have just closed the Mosque where the 911 killers plotted. In wanting to open one near the site of the tragedy, the Muslim community shows a serious disregard for the feelings of those directly affected by the tragedy. There is already one Mosque in the area. We have been led to believe that the new construction will be more of a center, like a, “YMHA” or the old “YMCA” of Hebrew and Catholic affiliation. It’s probably a good thing, but just as probably, more thought should go into the selection of different location.
Every time I hear some dumb rednecks exclaim that they’re going to take their country back, all can think is they wouldn’t have to if they and the clowns they elected hadn’t screwed it up so badly when they had it.
The big noise this past week was about the Wikileaks intelligence documents release. Everyone who seems to have real knowledge of the situation appears to feel that most of the information was out of date but that does not excuse the problem of putting those locals who have cooperated with us in danger. I understand that the young soldier responsible for the leak is a dedicated whistle blower but with the ability to do what he did comes the responsibility for the results of his actions. This isn’t about workers not getting enough coffee breaks, this is about people getting killed. The big question, is does the release of the documents have a point? Whether it does or not, it is an action fraught with dangerous possibilities. If it doesn’t then it is a completely frivolous act that smacks of treason. This is not like outing the Watergate burglars. This is about putting peoples lives in danger.
Why does the banking and financial establishment continue to attack the President. I understand that they don’t want any financial reform, but we saw how well they did without regulations during the Bush administration. No one likes being regulated, but almost everyone needs at least some regulation. It’s the nature of the beast to push the boundaries and especially the nature of the entrepreneurs who head up big business. Obama kept a number of these big businesses alive when most people were shouting for their heads. He understands that the country needs big business just as he understands that big business, like any bad child, needs regulation.
The bicycle situation in NYC has reached critical mass. While Bloomberg’s Traffic Commissioner, Ms Sadek-Khan pushes for more and more places to ride bicycles, the city ignores the fact that they have to be regulated, that the laws, which are on the books, have to be upheld. Bike riders need to be licensed and held to the traffic laws just like drivers. The city is now overflowing with helmeted, knee padded, imbeciles, negotiating bikes with no reflectors, along sidewalks on which they are forbidden; the wrong way on one-way streets; and through red lights that they don’t seem to believe exist. Do we have to wait for a couple of really gory deaths before the Mayor and Traffic Commissioner start dealing with the havoc they have created?
Earlier this week the House passed the state assistance bill and the President signed it into law. This bill will add to the Stimulus bill by saving or creating hundreds of thousands of jobs including school teachers, firemen, policemen etc. yet nearly every Republican voted “no,” calling the jobs saved “special interests.” Anybody who thinks teachers, police and firemen’s jobs are special interests is just too stupid to hold a job himself. Big business getting tax breaks to open factories overseas is a special interest, contracts to build roads going nowhere, are special interests. Saving jobs for the people who hold society together is called national self-interest, not special interest and if you can’t put that together you’ve really been smoking the wrong stuff.
One of the problems of our era’s political life is the absence of a, reform minded press to keep the politicos in line. Today’s press, even the most diligent, are more interested in the story than the message. What will help the country the most has become subservient to what will make better headlines. I was reminded of this, as I watched Chris Matthews show this weekend. John Heilman of New York Magazine had the audacity to say that the most important words for the 2012 election would be “Run Sarah run.” Did Heilman think that a Palin run would give the country the best chance at a rational functioning president or was it because it would make for a circus and better press opportunities? His attitude made it clear that his interest in a Palin run had nothing to do with the good of the country. It was predicated on the story possibilities that a joke candidate like Palin would bring to his profession. A despicable stance.
Let’s talk about stupid:
For years I’ve been hearing the far right knock the Eastern Intellectual Establishment. Is there a Western Intellectual Establishment that they aspire to or are they just against people being smart? I mean what kind of dumb schmuck wants to emulate the stupid elements of the society? Did somebody say Tea Party?
And speaking of the Tea Party, Sharon Angle, is their candidate for Senator of Nevada. Are they kidding? Is this an act of intellectual suicide? Are they trying to prove that they are the stupidest, most bigoted people on earth? This is a woman who has declared against abortion even if the woman has been raped or is the victim of incest. This is a woman who wants to end social security, who called for the elimination of the Energy Department and the department of Environmental Protection, who backed Joe Barton when he proved his idiocy by proclaiming that the BP compensation for victims was just a slush fund and who, with, great religious insight claimed that her candidacy was an act of God. This nutcase shouldn’t be elected, she should be institionalized.
And making a further case for dumb, I saw John Boehner on Meet the Press, unable to answer a single simple question and floundering about like a beached bass. And did you catch the color? Talk about over bronzed. Maybe if he spent as much time reading as he does sitting under a tanning light, he’d actually know what he was talking about.
Any discussion of political stupidity has to come from the mouths of those for whom stupidity is a way of life. These are not all uneducated people, for a lack of education is more often than not an economical problem rather than just a lack of sufficient brain cells. I’ve gathered a group of quotes and paraphrases uttered by my top, dumb politicians and I figured I’d just lay them out for you and let you draw your own conclusions.
Rand Paul: Has stated that cutting unemployment benefits will force people to go back to work. Very good Rand. Where?
Joe Barton: Figured that the President forcing BP to accept financial responsibility for the money lost due to their oil spill was tantamount to extortion. I wouldn’t want to be managing your next campaign Joe.
Sharon Angle: Opposes abortion even for rape and incest victims. Her advice to a 13 year-old girl who was pregnant by her father was to, ”turn a lemon situation into lemonade.” What can be said about a statement like that or the moron who made it?
Carley Fiorino: Ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground, dumped 33,000 employees, was rated one of the worst CEOs by Portfolio Magazine but thought she earned her $42M golden parachute. I’ll bet those out of work former employees thought so too.
Ron Johnson: Is glad there is global warming. He probably owns stock in a desert resort. He wants to go back to a time when corporations ran the country. Right on, Ron. They did such a great job during the Bush years.
Pat Toomey: Thinks the derivative industry has done great things for the country and been a positive force for the economy. He wants to give federal grants to companies that move off-shore. This is a man who must be force fed because he’s obviously too dumb to eat.
Roy Blunt: Is taking credit for Stimulus projects even though he voted against the Stimulus.
John Cornyn and Pete Sessions demanded, on Meet the Press, that we cut taxes and cut services in order to attain a balanced budget but when asked to name a program they would cut in pursuit of their goal neither dullard was able to name a single one. The double talk was hysterical.
Ken Buck: Thinks voters should vote for him and not Jane Norton, “because I do not wear high heels.” Well, at least not to church.
Now these and many other comments by our Republican congressmen or wanna-be congressmen can be taken two ways and neither are very flattering. Either they really are as stupid as they appear, or they are deeply in the pockets of various lobbyists who are taking good care of them for speaking up for the ludicrous and damaging causes they are backing.
I heard an interesting argument this weekend on Fareed Zakaria’s, GPS, where Jeff Sachs a Columba professor, Gavin Schmidt a climatologist and Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute argued about the solutions to global warming. Interestingly enough, Michaels, a right wing opponent of most of the current solutions, actually admits that the globe is warming, a refreshing lucidity compared to most of his anti-science compatriots.
Schmidt stated flat out that we are getting warmer and that co-2 emissions are at least adding to the problem. Michaels agreed but when Sachs suggested the taxing of co-2 emissions, he disagreed vehemently, stating that the money from those taxes wouldn’t be spent correctly because we still had no real insight and therefore no real plan on how to accomplish the elimination of fossil fuel gasses.
Well, we may not have a complete plan as to how to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and substitute other technology but we sure know, at least, part of how to do it. Economic law tells us that if you tax anything its use goes down and if you subsidize anything its use increases. This in itself, seems to run to a logical conclusion. Tax the hell out of fossil fuel emissions and use the tax money to subsidize new, emission free technologies. This is not rocket science and the guys who have been raving against “Cap & Trade” because it will make us fall behind China economically should stop and take a look at China which is already going from the biggest emitter of co-2 in the world to a country that is fast cleaning up its act and will soon leave us as the biggest villain in this scenario.
A story out of Afghanistan today, tells of the Taliban stoning a pair of young lovers to death because they eloped against the wishes of their families. This would be bad enough, if the gruesome punishment had just been carried out by the Taliban’s religious thugs, but it seems that it was participated in by over 200 of the lover’s friends and neighbors who celebrated after the event. Why are we trying to civilize these sub-human monsters? Why are we spending our children’s lives to turn this mass of prehistoric apes into a country?
Let’s Talk About War
So let’s talk about war. It’s a common word, found around the house. People have been at war ever since there were people. Sometimes it was just a rock fight, sometimes a full-scale nuclear barbacue. Looking at the human races history of warlike behavior we are forced to admit that as a species, we are just too dumb to settle our scores without a club in our hands. There are always a couple of wars going on someplace in the world. Never in my lifetime has there been a time when that was not true.
As a country we fit right in with the model. America can’t help but get into wars. We claim we are a peaceful nation but we spend more on our military budget than any other ten nations combined. The thought behind this is supposed to be that keeping prepared keeps us at peace but that just ain’t so. As soon as some country looks cross-eyed at us we start waving the flag at them and if they don’t lay down on their backs with their feet in the air and cry uncle we start shooting.
We actually did have a good reason for getting into WWII but since then, reasons for being in a war have been pretty hard to come by. Let’s see: Korea? Well, the Communists were going to overrun Southeast Asia if we didn’t defend the 59th parallel. Yeah, right. The cold war showed us just how imposing the communist threat was. So we killed a lot of our kids and a dozen years later we were sticking our noses into Vietnam for the same reason. Somehow we figured we could stop communism if we killed a lot of tough little rice farmers. That didn’t work out too well either. What it did accomplish was to split our country into two hostile camps. That probably wasn’t a good thing because it has been that way ever since. Vietnam was the reason the right and left separated; stopped being two political philosophies and became two fanatical ideologies bent on each other’s destruction.
I’m not even going to count the little dustup in the Caribbean. That wasn’t really a war. We already had more people vacationing there then they had troops. So we move on to Desert Storm where we defended little Kuwait against the marauders from Iraq. Of course we were fighting against our own weapons because we had given them to Saddam Hussein so he could hold off Iran. We have a very impressive history of giving weapons to people who then use them against us. Which brings us to Afghanistan, where all the ordinance we gave the Afghans to fight the Russians is now turned on us. I know, I skipped Iraq but somehow the thought scanned better if I went from our weapons to Afghanistan.
So how is it that we are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. How is it that a country, which has serious economic problems is wasting an outrageous amount of its money on two unnecessary wars. As of end of business today we will have spent $736,142,335,000.00 on the war in Iraq and $286, 453,395,000.00 on the war in Afghanistan. That’s over $1.05 trillion bucks gang. That’s a lot of health care, a lot of jobs, a lot of education, a lot of the debt reduced, a lot of everything. So what did we get for our $1.05 trillion, besides a lot of American kids in body bags?
Well, let’s see. We didn’t get the oil from Iraq, which no matter what Cheney tells us is the real reason we went to war there. We went to war in Iraq against a man who had been our ally, who was fighting us with weapons we had supplied him and still we won in two weeks. So how come eight years later we’re still fighting? How come eight years after Bush dressed up in his Little Soldier suit and declared mission accomplished we are till losing our sons and daughters in a country that has nothing but hatred to offer us? And they do hate us and they have good reason to. We are occupying their country.
I have no idea what we thought we were going to get from Afghanistan. We invaded a country the size of California that has never had anything roughly approximating a functioning central government because there were camps in it, where Al Queda was operating. Would anyone in Afghanistan have really cared if we’d just bombed the shit out of those camps and kept our troops home? Are the Afghani’s better off because we have kept a war going in their country for nine years instead of just blowing up a few hundred buildings in 2001? The Afghans actually liked us once. We helped them chase out the Russians and now they’re using the weapons we gave them to shoot down Russian helicopters to shoot down our helicopters.
The US military did a survey of Afghan people about a year ago. With a 10% literacy rate, most of the people interviewed didn’t know they lived in Afghanistan. These are simple people who live in small, segregated areas without education, without communication and without much of what makes up modern existence. If we feed them and give them schools they like us. If we shoot at them while we’re fighting an unsuccessful war with the Taliban they don’t like us. It’s a pretty logical situation. I imagine most of us would feel the same way if the Mexicans invaded and took back Texas.. Well, maybe not.
So what are we still doing in these two countries? What do we hope to achieve by staying? Both Bush’s and Obama’s governments have spoken ad nauseum about leaving stable governments in both countries. Really? That’ll be a first. The only stable government that Iraq has had was a dictatorship and Afghanistan has never had any kind of government at all, at least in the sense we understand it, that is, a constitutional body that actually has control of the whole country. Afghanistan is a series of small tribal areas governed by local chieftains and tied together by ethnic affiliations. Fifty percent of the country is Pashtun of which half are Taliban. The other half of the population is split between Tajiks, Hazara and Uzbeks and they hate each other almost as much as they hate the Pashtuns.
The Afghan government, such as it is, is run by a thief named Karzai who must have one hell of a Swiss bank account by now. Even the Pashtuns, his own people don’t like or trust him. The same can be said for the leaders of Pakistan and Iraq. This is an area of the world that has been renowned for centuries for double dealing, dishonesty and back stabbing and yet we go into it like widows to a con artist, our hand extended, full of money, thinking we are going to buy the loyalty of people who if they don’t hate us at the very least distain us. I don’t know why, but this country has never learned that you can’t buy friends. All you can buy is cooperation, and that lasts only as long as the money holds out.
Along with the trillion plus cost of military action we have pumped billions in aid into Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even the most naïve child knows that most of that money went into the pockets of thieving local politicians. The objects of that charity, the poor and starving have never seen a penny of what we have given to their leaders and so they hate us even more.
One of the main reasons we are still fighting in both those countries are the lobbyists working for our war supply industry. To twist an old phrase, there’s no business like war business. Guns are expensive but they get ten times more expensive when they are being sold to the US armed forces. Two small examples are the Browning M2, 50 caliber machine gun which should sell for about $1,200.00 but for which the military pays $14,002.00 and the M4OAI sniper rifle which sells to the military for $2,105.00 and the equivalent of which, the Remington 700 sells to you or me for $700.00. If you’re selling to the military you just don’t want the war to be over.
Of course, the main reason that we don’t just drop everything and come home is the old argument that if we do that, the people who fought with us would be massacred by the Taliban or whoever we have been fighting. The fact of the matter is, that to some extent, this will happen whether we wait for a stable government or not. It’s the way things have always been done in these countries.
There was a heartrending picture of a beautiful young woman with her nose cut off on the cover of last week’s Time Magazine. This, the argument went, is what will happen if we leave these poor people to the Taliban. The reality is that this has been happening in that country for centuries. It’s the kind of thing that will happen wherever religious fanaticism is allowed to prosper and it has been prospering in Afghanistan since time began. We will not stop this kind of barbarism by keeping troops in Afghanistan. India has supposedly been a civilized country for years but is still victim to this kind of religious barbarism as has been seen lately in a couple of horrendous incidents. Even if we get rid of the Taliban, which we won’t, there will still be religious leaders in these countries who solidify their power bases by condoning or even ordering fanatical, sub-human behavior like the disfiguring of that young woman. It has nothing to do with our presence in Afghanistan.
The biggest joke of all is our laughable attempt to fashion a fighting force of Afghan nationals. We’re trying to teach these guys to march while most of them can shoot the eye out of a flying pigeon at fifty yards. These people have been fighting each other since before the U.S. existed. They’re very good at it. All they need is motivation and backing us up is not part of their motivational credo. They know that as soon as we leave, no matter when that is, deals will be made, alliances will be forged and the power struggle will go on. It’s why Karzai is talking to the Taliban even as he takes money and troops from us. We can see in Iraq that even before we have left the locals are getting ready to deal and fight their way into accommodations that will make some strong and rich and others poor and dead. The peoples of this area speak of honor but that only has to do with who’s looking cross eyed at their women. Their word is less than useless and there is no concept of honorable politics. Not that we’re so politically honorable ourselves.
So what should we do? We should get out, as soon as it is physically possible. The different factions in Iraq will have the same fights if we leave tomorrow as they will have if we leave in two years. They have already shown us that. We just don’t want to believe it because it will hurt our egos. Somehow we can’t accept the fact that the rest of the world can get along without us. If we leave Afghanistan tomorrow the Taliban will not overrun the country. They will retain the same territory they have now and maybe a little more but those Tajiks, Uzbeks and Harzara who are against the Taliban will keep them at bay much as they did before we landed in their country. And as far as Al Queda, who are supposed to be the reason we are in Afghanistan, they will stay in Pakistan a long as they are comfortable there and when they’re not they will move someplace else like Indonesia where they are right now setting up camps.
And not only should we pull our troops out of these countries, we should also pull out our money. Instead of giving the governments of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan billions of dollars that we need here, we should give significant amounts of those dollars to established charitable organizations to go into those countries and actually achieve the goals we intended that money to achieve. For a fraction of what we give to Karzai we could build all the schools and hospitals that his country needs and still have the bulk of the money left over for our own mounting needs. Give the money to CARE or a guy like George Mortensen who has established 145 schools in Afghanistan while we are trying to blow the country up.
Right now the single largest expenditure of the US government is military spending at 26.5% of income. This is followed by health costs at 20.1% and debt service at 13.6%. These three categories account for 60% of our spending. Education accounts for 2%. This is ridiculous.
Two quotes from Nicholas Kristof:
“In the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama promised to invest in a global education fund. … he is (now) spending enough every five weeks in Afghanistan to ensure that practically every child on our planet gets a primary education.”
“We won our nations independence for $2.4 billion in today’s money… we now fritter away that amount every nine days in Afghanistan.”
And one from Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates;
“Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?”
Why is it that everyone except the government seems to see the futility of our two wars and the money we spend on them. Our country used to be very macho about winning wars. Then came Korea where we wouldn’t admit to losing a war that seemed to come out a tie. This was followed by Vietnam where we were so worried about losing that we hung around until we were run out of the country. It would be a terrible shame if we let that happen again.
It’s Little Big Horn, All Over Again
There was much ado last week about The Iroquois Nation’s Lacross team and their international troubles. It all smells of too many bureaucrats creating problems which, they were clueless about solving.
Yes, it could all have been settled if the US would have vouched for the Iroquois passports and it also could have been solved by the Brits taking a realistic instead of an institutionalized view of what was really happening. I mean were they really worried about some terrorist Indian shooting an arrow at Big Ben?
On the other hand, The Iroquois, who insist on being considered an independent nation should, maybe, start acting like one. Handwritten passports? I mean, really. Were they paying for their flight with wampum?
The unrealistic position of the Native American peoples in the United States is beyond fantasy. Sure they were the first ones here… maybe. The question of whether they attacked the Europeans or whether the Europeans attacked them is shrouded in mystery and myth but by the time the Europeans had settled here and made this a nation the natives were no longer able to compete. In the history of human relations, except in the case of our Native Americans, this has always meant one of two things. Either they assimilated or they were annihilated. Neither of these things happened here although the revised history books tell us that the US cavalry gave it their best shot.
Having not done the research as to why the present, unworkable situation exists (I refer to the fact that Native Americans’ are their own Nations instead of American citizens) I can only say that I think the Indians, got screwed. But it seems to be a screwing of, their own instigation. Yes, they have preserved their heritage but in doing so they have prevented themselves from integrating into the general society and much like the many successful immigrant influxes, harvesting the benefits of that integration.
Creating their own nations left them stuck on reservations, victims of poverty and alcoholism. The only good thing that being their own nation did for them was to give them sovereign rights to have gambling casinos on their non-US land. The result of this is that a small number of Native Americans have gotten pretty rich and the rest are still sitting on various reservations trying to figure out how to build their own casinos.
The bottom line is that Native Americans, probably weren’t the original settlers of this land but in all probability, like us, kicked the people who preceded them off their land and took over. Unlike the Mayas, Aztecs or Olmecs, the Native Americans built almost nothing and left very little behind in the way of a civilization to be preserved.
I am the child of immigrants. Unlike the Native Americans my grandparents traveled a huge distance across a great ocean to get here. Once they arrived they didn’t try to set up their own nation in Bensonhurst. They immediately started to integrate into the existing culture. This enabled them to preserve their own heritage while incurring great benefits to themselves and the country in which they now live.
Liberals Not Doing Their Job
Today’s issue will not, as you have come to expect, be framed as an attack on the far right but as a show of disgust for the left for turning on a President who has been doing exactly the things they elected him to do.
Obama made several pre-election promises. He has, despite the intrusion of an economic disaster brought on by the Bush policies and a greedy business community forged ahead to fulfill those promises. This, despite the fact, that from four months before his inauguration until 2 months after it the country lost 6.7 million jobs. This was not something Obama had been able to plan for when he was running and making those promises.
Despite this Republican created disaster and despite a Republican sector of congress that has done nothing but log jam everything put before them, Obama has passed a Health Care Bill, a rational bank & business regulation bill and a Stimulus package of $787B that although not perfect has helped businesses and through unemployment extensions kept afloat a good percentage of those who lost their jobs. It has also invested in ecologically significant businesses, which have added part of the 600,000 jobs that have been created in the last year.
Yes, we’re still in Iraq and Afghanistan and yes, he promised to end both those youth killing, money draining wars. I will do a piece on both those wars, both of which, I am against, at a future date but for now suffice it to say, that if the current plans work, we will probably be out of both those countries, as much as we ever leave someplace we have fought, in a relatively short time.
Obama hasn’t passed a significant immigration bill but despite that, he has passed more legislation, quicker than any president since Roosevelt and he’s done so with the economic disaster caused by the Republicans and the business community hanging over his head and clouding the whole picture. So what the hell’s the beef?
Why is it that Obama’s ratings are falling with the same people who elected him and whose wishes he is trying to fulfill? It makes no sense. Would they rather have the Republican’s whose policies caused this depression back in office? Are they scared by the national debt? They should be, but Obama didn’t cause it and his policies aren’t going to cause default.
The people who worry about our huge national debt whine about the cost of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Unemployment benefits, the new health care and the stimulus package. Okay, let’s look at them: SS is paid for by us as a tax on our salaries or profits, it actually finances a number of other programs. Yes it’s in trouble mainly because there aren’t enough workers earning it now to support the program but the money that’s in it didn’t come from anyplace but our own pockets. The same is partly true for Medicare and Medicaid and unemployment. None of these programs were instituted by Obama. The health care bill, which has all the uninformed crying disaster will, according to most knowledgeable economists actually reduce the current costs and add to any future surplus. That leaves the Stimulus package. $787 billion is a lot of money, but it certainly didn’t cause the debt we have now. Neither did Bush’s Tarp, probably the smartest thing he did in eight years. What did these programs actually do? Well they extended unemployment benefit’s, they fed money into programs that kept teachers, police and firemen on the job and they gave money to banks and corporations to keep them from folding. Ahh, that’s the rub. The Stimulus money went to private companies to help them continue to make money. Well, it did do that, but what it accomplished was keeping GM and Chrysler in business and helping to maintain thousands of jobs. As a result, GM, at least, is coming back fast. The banks that were helped will not crash the way they did in the Great Depression and are already paying back the money they received.
What we need now is another stimulus package aimed at creating new jobs by financing the companies that the banks so far refuse to finance. That includes spending huge amounts on national infrastructure. This country desperately needs highways, bridges, high-speed rail, broadband, airports and ports and it needs advanced high-tech security for all of the above. A program aimed at meeting these needs will create a wide variety of jobs at all levels of the educational spectrum that will have a place for every worker.
I was watching Meet the Press yesterday and listening to Texas Republican senators John Cornyn and Pete Sessions argue, vehemently, about the need to reduce the debt without adding any taxes. Sounded great but when David Gregory asked them for some program they would be willing to go on record as cutting to accomplish this goal neither of them could come up with a single suggestion. That is so typical, not just of the do nothing Republican members of congress but also of the liberals, libertarians and independents who voted for Obama and are now turning against him. They’re against whatever’s Obama’s doing but they have no constructive alternative to it and by their unconstructive criticism they are hurting their own goals. If Obama has to waste his time going out across the country, campaigning for the candidates who will push his agenda instead of staying in Washington and pushing through more legislation the goals of the people who elected him, the same people who are now abandoning him, will be thwarted.
In 2008 this country gave Obama a mandate and then the business community, through greed and stupidity pulled the carpet out from under his ability to carry out that mandate. By pushing the nation to the edge of another depression, they created a problem far worse than any he had sworn to solve Now they are chafing under the new regulations which, will hopefully, slow down their ability to make the same mistakes again. The financial industry spent hundred of thousands of dollars lobbying against the bill. Maybe they should have used that money to invest in job creating small business instead.
The business community is like an adventurous kid, that you love but to whom you constantly have to say “NO.” No doesn’t stop him, it rarely slows him down but you have to keep doing it just to keep him from killing himself.
On the other hand the Liberals, Libertarians and Independents are not used to pushing ahead and getting their way. They are so used to losing that they don’t know how to deal with a win. They got one in November of 2008 and instead of enjoying it, instead of getting behind their winner and helping him achieve their goals, they immediately fractured.
“But he didn’t do this, but he’s not doing that, but it’s costing too much, but…”
Hey!! Shut up and look around. You’re getting what you wanted. You’re so used to whining about Bush not accomplishing anything that you haven’t been able to recognize someone who is actually getting the job done. It doesn’t happen over night. It’s a monumental job and a lot of bad, stupid, greedy people are trying to stop it from happening and your whining and negative BS isn’t helping so just sit back, shut up and let the guy do his job, the job you elected him to do. Stop being part of the problem. Try being part of the solution. You might like the result.
Lebron & The BCS
Well the story that has kept the nations breath bated has finally been resolved and hopefully left the headlines, leaving fans and ownerships across the country feeling cheated and abused. All except slick Pat Reilly in Miami. And why are they all upset; because a kid decided to play ball with his buddies. What a horrible crime. LEBRON JAMES HAS LEFT CLEVELAND. What an awful idea. Why would he do such a thing? How about because it was Cleveland?
Why is this a surprise to anyone? When you give twenty-year-old kids millions of bucks a year to play a child’s game you are turning the asylum over to the inmates. The owner’s greed created this problem and now they face a situation where three of the kids got together and will spend the next few years thumbing their noses at them. I’m just surprised that they didn’t buy their own franchise. That will happen in the not too distant future. Money is power and these kids have more money than they know what to do with.
Yes, Lebron could have acted classier about the announcement, like maybe telling Cleveland management before he went on TV but the bottom line is that he had every right to play with his friends. Who would have done differently? Those who say he wasn’t loyal to Cleveland just don’t understand professional sports. There is no loyalty in pro sports, only what did you do for me today. If Lebron has a career impeding injury tomorrow he will be dropped like a hot potato by whoever he’s playing for.
I was in my car listening to Sid Rosenberg on WFAN this morning. Sid, who I always liked, was saying how Lebron will never be as great as Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan because he has never won an NBA championship. An idiotic statement. Sid suffers from that terminal WFAN disease; championship fever. That’s when some supposedly knowledgeable sports commentator claims an athlete who plays in a team sport is less of a star because his team hasn’t won a championship. Mad Dog Russo was the first person I heard propagate this crap, but Moronic Mad Dog thinks tennis doubles is a team sport. I’ve even heard Mike Francesa make the same ridiculous assertion. Anyone who has ever played team sports knows that one man, no matter how great a player, cannot win a championship by himself. Even Wilt Chamberlain, probably the most dominant player in the history of the NBA only won when he got serious help. Yet I’ve heard any number of commentators say this even about football players, especially quarterbacks, who only play half of each game. It’s brain dead.
Anyhow, Sid was on with someone named Kim Jones. First time I’d heard her, lovely speaking voice, great on-air presence but ruined it all by making a series of even more brain dead comments about Lebron. She couldn’t resist slamming him by claiming that he ruined his image, (maybe his life) by doing the one-hour announcement show and how he was so awful and implying that it was his fault the show stunk. HELLO? This is not a slick entertainer. This is a twenty-five year old kid with a high school education, who put himself in the hands of supposed professionals at the behest of ESPN a huge sports network. And this dame is blaming Lebron because the show stunk. What is the matter with her? If the show was ill planned, ill paced; if the interview was boring, is this the fault of a kid who pays basketball or is it the fault of the so called seasoned pros who put it together? This woman is in the sports programming business. How could she not know who’s at fault here? How could she be so unaware, so ill informed that she doesn’t know how this deal works? I didn’t see the show, I was playing poker but it doesn’t take a genius to understand that the network pros should have been carrying Lebron, not the other way around. He gets blamed for losing basketball games not tanking ill- conceived TV shows. I’m not even a Lebron fan and I can see that.
On another note, the NCAA missed a wonderful chance to have its whole football picture torn apart when only a couple of relatively unimportant schools switched conferences this year. The predicted realignment of the Big Ten and the Pac 10 neither of whom can count, didn’t happen and the Big Twelve, who now can’t count either has remained viable. None of this, unfortunately, has brought anything like sanity to the phony BCS championship series. How can it be a series when they only play one game and the opponents for that game are chosenby negotiation. Think how much more exciting it would have been last year if Boise State had a real shot at the National Title, or maybe Cincinnati. Guaranteed that Kelly would not have left for Notre Dame before Cincy’s Bowl game if it had any real significance. The reality is that it didn’t mean squat and more importantly Kelly understood that it never would under the current setup.
The game is rigged, guys. If you don’t come from a big conference or are Notre Dame, you will never get a shot at the BCS championship game and that is only one of the reasons why it’s outrageous to continue the way we are. This is a country that loves the underdog but the BCS just won’t let them play. Why, because they don’t want to lose power, they’re afraid that they won’t make as much money under another system. This just proves that the guys who run the system are brute stupid. A true college football champion series would be the biggest earner in American sports. Nothing would ever come close to it. The TV package would match the Super Bowl and dwarf the World Series. Can’t you just see a 16 team tournament, where little Boise State knocks off Michigan, Oklahoma and Stanford to face Florida in the Championship. Can you imagine the hype, the dollar signs. I just can’t understand how anyone is dumb enough to pass this up. And don’t give me that old BS about the kids being away from classes too long. As I explained in an earlier column, if you cut one game from everyone’s regular schedule thereby allowing all the bad teams to quit a week earlier and substituted the playoff games for the insignificant bowl games now being played you’d be left with 1 extra game for 4 teams and two extra games for the championship opponents. Not much of a sacrifice to get a true national champion. It’s the epitome of the American way in image and $-signs. Right now BCS stands for Boring, Crummy, Slop. It could stand for something much better, like the real thing.
Whose War is it Anyway?
This issue’s topic is going to be the war in Afghanistan but before I get into it, I’d like to touch briefly on a topic from a few issues back about getting what we vote for.
Last Sunday, listening to Joe Barton, Republican Senator from Texas rant about Obama being an extortionist because he wanted BP to pay for the oil spill, I had the feeling that the heavens had opened up and God had reached out his hand and said to me, “Here ole buddy, this one’s for you. ” Here was a Senator from Texas, telling his constituents that their taxes should be paying for the cleanup, not the company that caused it.
I bet all those good ole boys who voted for Oil Spill Joe are really hoisting a cold one to him now. I bet they’d like to shove one of those long necks right down his ignorant throat.
But on to the topic of the day, Afghanistan. Why are we there and should we stay there?
Well, we’re there because Bush and Cheney decided that the best way to kill off a few hundred Al Queda, was to invade a country. Then they got so busy starting a war for the oil we never got out of Iraq that they forgot they had troops in a war one country over. So now we’ve been there nine years and despite Obama’s November 2011 promise, there’s really no end in sight. Why is this?
Well, for one thing we’ve invaded a country that isn’t really a country. What it actually is, is an accumulation of little fiefdoms, each run by its own chief with no connection to any of the other fiefdoms except if they happen to be made up of members of the same tribe. With a 10% literacy rate, most of the people of Afghanistan don’t even know that they live in Afghanistan. For most of these people the limits of their world is the valley in which they reside. They care nothing and know less about national borders or aims. They are only interested in what happens in their village because that’s all that directly affects them and their families.
Most of the country is made up of Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara tribesmen all of whom have been at war with each other for centuries. Hamid Karzai, the president of the country is Pashtun and interestingly enough all of the Taliban are too. So when Karzai begins talks with the Taliban leaders, as they’ve hinted at this last week, maybe our government shouldn’t be too surprised.
I watched John McCain, a man for whom I have lost a great deal of respect make the most cogent comments aired on the firing of General McCrystal this week. Among those comments, he said that by putting a time frame on our pullout from Afghanistan all we were doing was letting the Taliban know that if they just sat around and didn’t cause too much trouble for the next year the country would be theirs. This makes too much sense for Obama to not understand it. So why did he make such a tactically terrible promise? Politics. The far left was screaming its head off to get out. There is a significant political faction on the left that has stated that you must have a stop date for a war. That may be one of the stupidest concepts ever promulgated. The stop date is when you win the war or when you lose it. You can’t establish it ahead of time because you never know when it’s going to happen. The stop date for WWII was when we beat the living crap out of Germany and when we dropped the big one on Japan. In Korea and Vietnam there was no stop date. We just faded away. Nor will there be a stop date for either Iraq or Afghanistan. Stop dates are ridiculous and Obama has only set one because he promised the radical left that he would get out of Afghanistan and then the press started asking when?
So where does that leave us? Well, the Pashtun make up about 50% of the population with the rest divided up into Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara. The Hazara were almost made extinct by the Taliban during the five-year civil war that followed the fourteen-year Russian war but was before the nine-year American war. Are you beginning to get the picture? Various estimates run from 100,000 to 300,000 Hazara being massacred by the Taliban so the Hazara are in no mood to see the Taliban get back in power. Neither are the Uzbeks or the Tajiks.
Our current solution seems to be involved with teaching the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara to fight. It’s ridiculous. These people have been fighting for centuries. They’re great fighters. Our goal should be to encourage them to fight on our side, which they would already be willing to do if we weren’t backing Karzai, a Pashtun who they hate because they think he stole the election and everything else in the country that isn’t nailed down.
So what’s the answer? Well, nobody really knows if there is one, but we can’t just hang around for another ten years hoping one will pop out of the woodwork, so maybe we should be a little proactive and try something new.
As stated above the Pashtuns make up 50% of the country and 100% of the Taliban, which means there are too many of them to kill so we obviously have to find a way to deal with them. In this, Karzai is right. This is a war that can never really be won so it must be negotiated but right now the Taliban has no incentive to negotiate. Obama has already told them that if they just wait, we’ll leave. So maybe the first thing he should do is revoke the exit date. This will make all the left and many other peace loving people very upset but maybe they should learn to live with the realities of the world. We are in this war because of Bush but that doesn’t mean we should just stay in it forever the way Bush would. If we just walk away we will have betrayed every person in Afghanistan that backed us and we will leave them to face an enemy that has already been guilty of mass extermination.
The traditional way to win a war was always to occupy the territory of the vanquished and to subjugate all the vanquished peoples. This was never a great idea as even the Romans eventually discovered but with the advent of modern weaponry it has become an impossibility. We should have learned this lesson in Vietnam. Obviously our policy makers didn’t.
What has happened is that in our pursuit of a few hundred Al Queda terrorists we have inherited a war against hundreds of thousands of religious fanatics. There is no practical way to beat these guys. It’s their country. What we can do is create a negotiated stalemate. We have to get the Taliban, the Pastuns, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks and the Hazara to sit down and negotiate a peace. Everyone except the Taliban seems to be willing to do that. So how do you get the Taliban to sit down and talk? Not by saying that we’ll be leaving in a year but by saying that we are going to spend the foreseeable future inflicting the greatest number of casualties possible on their forces. That means forgetting about nation building until after there’s a peace and forgetting about holding the fort at all and attacking with everything we have so that we can inflict the greatest number of casualties possible and maybe force the Taliban to negotiate.
If we can get them to the table, the next step is to make sure that each faction is included and that each is given something that will allow it to see the attractions of peace. We are dealing here, not with a nation, but with a conglomeration of medieval tribesman whose only civilized asset is their ability to use modern weaponry. We must provide each little fiefdom with its own reward and threaten each with the consequences of continued war. This means that the Taliban will always be there, an itch in the side of every free thinking human being in the region but maybe that’s better than this unending killing. Basically what I am promoting here is the same strategy that ended the war with Japan minus the atomic alternative.
Considering the history of the region, this may or may not work but we really don’t have many alternatives. So far nothing has worked. There is no conventional victory in this war. A win in Afghanistan is defined as a cessation of the killing. Nothing more. Any attempt at nation building must come after the shooting has stopped not as it is currently being conducted, as a possible solution to the fighting.
There was never a legitimate reason to be in Afghanistan. We have always had the ability to kill bad guys without committing troops. That’s what we should have done about the camps that bred the 911 attack. But now even that reason is gone. Intelligence sources put the Al Queda numbers in the country at about a hundred men. A joke number considering that we have about 130,000 troops trying to kill them and it’s costing is a billion bucks a day to do it. There are more Al Queda in Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia than in Afghanistan. Hell, there’s probably more in this country. Why aren’t we attacking all these countries? Maybe because modern warfare isn’t the way to deal with them. It’s like killing a fly with a hand grenade. It gets the fly but it also destroys your house. That’s what we’re doing now. Bleeding our country to death to win a war that we shouldn’t be fighting.
I’m watching Senator Cornyn, R-Texas on Meet the Press, complain about how the Democrats blame Bush for everything that’s wrong in a country the Democrats are running.
It would be a viable complaint if it held water but it doesn’t. Yes, the Democrats are running the country now, because for eight years the Republicans did nothing to run it efficiently. If anyone out there really thinks this country would have elected a black president against a functioning rival they just aren’t paying attention. Obama was elected because the Bush administration was the largest accumulation of liars and incompetents ever to run our government.
Obama has been in office about eighteen months. When he entered the White House he was greeted by two unfunded wars, reduced taxes that had changed a zero deficit into a trillion dollar debt and a failing economy that was the result of unregulated big business managing to screw up the entire economy. We were losing jobs at a rate of seven hundred fifty thousand a month.
The only thing Bush did right in eight years was Tarp, a belated attempt to shore up the failing economy. Yes it cost money and now Republican’s like Cornyn are trying to blame the deficit caused by things like Tarp on Obama.
Now only eighteen months into Obama’s administration things are turning around. For the first time since the last six months of the Bush administration we are adding jobs. Still, the right wing in a desperate attempt to salvage some of their own jobs in the congress continue to propagate the big lie, claiming that the Obama administration has done nothing and is blaming all the problems of the country on the Bush administration. Well, truthfully the Democrats do blame many of the problems of the country on the Bush administration. Why? Because that’s where the blame lies. Let’s look at the record.
Bush administration in eight years:
Allowed the 911 attack despite any number of warnings that it was about to happen.
Lied us into two unnecessary wars.
Reduced taxes to get votes, thereby turning a zero deficit into a trillion dollar deficit.
Sat back and watched as Katrina destroyed New Orleans and left the city to die.
Spied on US citizens in violation of the Constitution.
Allowed, or encouraged big business to run rampant over all regulation and precipitated the crash of 2008 that almost put this country out of business.
Obama administration in one and 1/2 years:
Added to the deficit in a successful attempt to pull the country out of an impending depression.
Turned the depression around and has currently added about 300,000 jobs.
Passed a health care bill.
Passed an economic regulation bill. Neither of these bills are perfect but at least they are a start in the right direction.
These are facts. Who do you think is doing a better job and why shouldn’t the Democrats blame the Bush administration for making their job a 100% harder than it should have been. If Obama hadn’t had to deal with two wars, a trillion dollar deficit and a destroyed economy he could already be working on a solution of our dependence on oil and other serious ecological problems that the nation and the world are facing and maybe if the Republicans faced the reality of their previous failure and stopped sulking about losing an election they deserved to lose, they’d get on board and help Obama help the country to recover from the various disasters they caused.
A Country Built On Immigration
In the last few weeks the immigration bruhaha, because of the actions of the Governor of Arizona has reached a peak not seen since the last presidential election. Now this is a very important problem , nowhere near as important or maybe as immediate as say the economy, the oil spill, the wars, health care or economic regulation. But it does have its place in the national debate so let’s take a look at it. There are three principal voices now making the most noise in the situation, Jan Brewer, the Governor of Arizona, The President of the United States and Felipe Calderon, the President of Mexico.
The President of Mexico, you say. What the hell does he have to say about it? Well quite a bit it seems. He appeared before congress and had a lot to say against Jan Brewer’s new law. A lot of members of Congress applauded him, Obama had good things to say about him but no one felt the need to point out that it was none of his business or that our problems with illegal Mexican immigration were being caused to a great extent by his country’s inability to feed its people or keep them safe. Maybe if Calderon spent as much time solving his country’s problems as he spends getting involved with ours, we’d have at least one less problem. So Felipe baby, shut up!
Then there’s Obama who has jumped in and said that the new law is unconstitutional. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. I mean, it sure looks like it is. But that’s not for him to decide so maybe he should be spending his time securing the border. No, 1200 National Guardsmen aren’t going to do that and maybe the problem isn’t just coming from the Mexican border. We have just as long a border with Canada and it’s way less secure than the Mexican border and there’s just as much illegal traffic coming that way but whereas Mexico’s traffic is illegal labor that is taking jobs from poor white workers, Canada’s is drugs and weapons and who cares about that?
Actually 40% of illegal immigration in this country comes through our airports in the form of tourists, students and temp workers who when their Visas expire, just stay. Now a lot of these illegal’s are much more desirable immigrants than brown stoop labor but that doesn’t really make them any more legal. So when the right wing starts yelling about all these people being criminals because they’re here illegally, just remember, these people include a lot of well-trained scientists, kind of like the guys who invented the atomic bomb.
Brewers law, as it will certainly come to be known, prohibits, as every Republican worthy of his party will tell you, any kind of profiling. Gee, that’s great. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But let’s forget, for the moment, about the legal aspects of the law and look at the practical execution of it.
Since the Arizona police can’t profile does that mean that they must ask everyone regardless of size, shape, skin tone, hair or eye color for their papers? Do they have to ask the governor for hers? It would seem so, making the execution of the law just a tad impractical.
Now we all know that, that’s not how it’s going to work so let’s have a look at the reality. Unless you’re completely inexperienced on a personal basis with the law, hopelessly naïve about how citizen/officer confrontation works or terminally stupid you have to know that the bottom feeders in the Arizona police departments, and every state, country and local department has them, will take advantage of this law to harass both immigrants and citizens who bear even a distant resemblance to anyone Hispanic. That makes it a bad law, not necessarily an unconstitutional one but just one that will cause more problems than it will solve.
So what’s the solution? Well, for openers to do a better job sealing the borders and not just to stop poor workers from coming across. We absolutely have to solve the problem of those immigrants who come here legally on temporary visas and then just disappear into the system. That’s where your bombers and terrorists will come from.
The big question, however, is what to do with the twelve million illegal immigrants who are already here. I say, find a way to make them legal. If they want to stay, they must become legal so they have to learn English, learn the naturalization information and get on track to citizenship. Then they have to pay some kind of fine.
But they’re criminals, the right wing screams. Sure they are, but on a very low level; on a lower level than a drunken driver who has the potential to kill your kids, on a much lower level than all the greedy manipulators who crashed our economy, on a much, much lower level than every congressman who votes against the needs of his constituency because some lobbyist has promised him election funds. Let’s face it; these people have snuck into our country because they are looking for a better life, just like my grandparents and probably yours. This is not a heinous crime and should not be treated as such… unless you have another agenda. Unless you’re a bigot.
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