What
follows is my reactions to the news of late October and early
November 2018, as it relates to American politics; especially to the
results of the 2018 midterm elections, the October 27th
shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and whether it was appropriate for now-former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from Robert Mueller's probe concerning possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian agents.
These remarks were prepared for a gathering at a library in
Highwood, Illinois, wherein members of the community, mostly senior
citizens, meet to discuss current political events, especially in
regards to national and international issues.
These were my responses to those of the moderator's questions which
interested me most, and to those questions on which I felt
sufficiently qualified to comment. I have omitted additional and
secondary questions which the moderator asked, but on which I did not
feel a need to make a direct comment.
Topics #1, #2, and #3: The Roots of Political Polarization, and Crises at the Border
Question #1/#2/#3:
“Political debates today seem more intense because conservatives
and liberals are more often starting from different principles.
...Democrats who have called for open border policy have fallen
silent, as those who want to abolish the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement Agency... know that the caravan is not a winning issue
for Democrats now. It's not just helpless women and children...
Others know if mass illegal immigration is not stopped, then others
will follow.
...Do you see the left and right coming together, or will they
continue talking past one another?
…The migrants often show up with diseases including contagious ones such as scabies, chicken pox, tuberculosis, typhoid, and leishmaniasis, which must be treated immediately.
…The migrants often show up with diseases including contagious ones such as scabies, chicken pox, tuberculosis, typhoid, and leishmaniasis, which must be treated immediately.
...Agents at the biggest port of entry from Mexico are overwhelmed
by those who seek asylum legally... The backlog will only worsen, as
bigger groups are soon to follow.”
Answer #1/#2/#3:
The “left” and right will start coming together as soon as they
stop seeing each other as polar opposites, “left” and “right”.
Democrats are not “the Left”; socialists and communists
are. Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi have admitted to being for
capitalism and against socialism. Obamacare was inspired by two
Republican governors (Romney and Pawlenty); it's not socialism.
Also, Republicans are not the most far-right political
ideology that exists; fascists and Nazis are. Democrats and
Republicans are not as far apart as some people would have you
believe they are. They compromise with each other all the time.
Republicans give-in to Democrats' demands to spend more money and
grow the government, and Democrats let Republicans impose whatever
totalitarian regulation they want, as long as somebody gets free
goodies as compensation.
You ask, “will the left and right sides of the aisle continue
talking past one another?” I say that both parties are all too
eager to compromise, when it comes to putting all of our human
rights and civil liberties on the negotiation table to be voted away
at the whim of the narrow majority. Democrats and Republicans don't
care about liberty or equality, safety or health, or opportunity;
they only care about securing their own power, winning re-elections,
and getting paid. The voting public has sent our lawmakers a clear
message: get both parties on-board to throw our precious natural
freedoms out the window as fast as you can, get both parties on
board, and we will continue to send you money and re-elect you in
record numbers.
We can do much better than this, and the first step is to hold
Democrats to their progressive ideals (like being skeptical of
big government, instead of just calling for more government bureaus
that will only end up unaccountable), and to hold Republicans to the
ideals of true libertarian-leaning small-government conservatism.
Equality must guide Democrats, and liberty must guide Republicans,
or we will only get more of what we've gotten for the last 170 years
of Democratic or Republican control: bigger and more expensive
federal government, more wars, and the utter decimation of the
precious Bill of Rights, whose liberties so many troops have fought
overseas trying to defend.
I would like to urge libertarians and conservatives to consider the
possibility that it is not primarily socialist ideals which
cause them to hate Democrats; it's their adoption of Republican
legislation, and their embrace of an overly-centralized, top-down
government structure in which blue states are effectively deprived of
all legal protections against Republican presidents who want to order
the states around.
Libertarians and conservatives, what you dislike about Democrats is
their power-hungry nature, and their abandonment of the
working class; not the idea that the Democrats embrace the
working class too much. Bernie Sanders supporters recognized
that Hillary Clinton cares more about Wall Street than Main Street,
and they were right to send her the message that their trust has to
be earned, not taken for granted.
The idea that the migrant caravan has anything in it besides people
who are in need of freedom and opportunity and the means to survive,
is helping to create a wave of xenophobia and anti-immigrant
sentiment, that is harming everyone in America who is not a
“perfectly” white, Christian, law-abiding citizen, whose
grandparents were all born here. Anything “less” than that
– even speaking a language besides English, or displaying another
country's flag – will always be viewed by a certain segment of
Americans as unpatriotic. We can describe this as wrong, and we'd be
correct to describe it as wrong, but it is reality.
Even if some immigrants are bringing guns and drugs into the
country, that is no guarantee that they intend to use them, it is no
guarantee that they are violent people, and it is no guarantee that
they are terrorists. The fear that terrorists are among these
refugees is motivated by a desire to claim that these refugees
present a military-level threat to the security of this country,
which is not true.
We cannot infer that these immigrants pose a threat, from the simple
fact that some of them are military-age males. Being an adult male
who is not yet a citizen of the United States, is no guarantee that
you are a military-level threat to America. Military-age males have
every right to use firearms to protect their families as they try to
cross deserts patrolled by drug gangs.
To be unarmed in such a situation would be downright foolish, and it
would show reckless disregard for the safety of one's family. The
same can be said about failing to break the law by crossing a border,
when any rational person cares more about feeding their starving
family, than the need to obey an imaginary line drawn on the ground
by men who died centuries ago.
If Americans want Honduran immigrants to stop coming to America,
then Americans should stop re-electing the politicians who supported
the 2009 ouster of the democratically-elected liberal Honduran
President Manuel Zelaya. American generals reportedly met with
Zelaya's opposition shortly before his overthrow, which they
apparently did in order to guard against Hugo Chavez's then-growing
influence in Latin America.
We cannot continue the Reagan-Bush foreign policy, of using
sanctions and coups and election interference against every Latin
American and Muslim-majority country who doesn't bend to our will.
This did not stop under Obama, it has not stopped under Trump. As
long as we continue to sponsor coups in Latin American and Islamic
countries, and provide military support to terrorist groups that are
undermining the stability of democratically elected regimes (which
have every right to represent the interests of their own people,
not necessarily Americans' interests), then their people will
come here.
We need to stop giving them a reason to hate us. Blowing up their
infrastructure and deposing their governments has only caused
blowback for the United States the whole 65 years we've been trying
it, and to continue this foolish policy will only result in more
unintended consequences. It will cause more immigrants who hate us to
come here, while the immigrants who like us will be stuck in
their own countries, dying from American bombs while they're
defending the sovereign governments they voted into power, but which
had to be destroyed because they refused to sell their own people out
to American financial and geopolitical interests.
I know I criticized Ronald Reagan a moment ago, but he was right
about one thing: the time he admitted that Americans are foolish to
think they can understand, and plan around, the irrationality of
Middle East politics. Reagan had this to say on the matter: “Perhaps
we didn't appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the
complexity of problems that made the Middle East such a jungle.
Perhaps the idea of a suicide car bomber committing mass murder to
gain instant entry to Paradise was so foreign to our own values and
consciousness that it did not create in us the concern for the
Marines' safety that it should have. In the weeks immediately after
the bombing [in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983], I believe the last thing
that we should do was turn tail and leave. Yet the irrationality of
Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there. Is
there would be some rethinking of policy before our men die, we would
be a lot better off. If that policy had changed towards more of a
neutral position, and neutrality, those 241 Marines would be alive
today.” I just wish that he had realized it sooner, and I wish that
he had taken that lesson of not intervening in countries you don't
understand, and applied that lesson to the countries that he and
George Bush Sr. helped destroy; Honduras, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil,
Uruguay, and Suriname.
To quote a man named Orlando Battista, “An error is not a mistake
until you refuse to correct it.” To stop this disastrous foreign
policy is not to admit defeat; not of the American military, not of
the American way of life, not of our liberties. The only outcome of
reversing our belligerent foreign policy – which naively assumes
that we can just boss people around, and steal and bomb their stuff,
until we get our way - will be fewer American soldiers dying for no
reason (other than to serve as cannon fodder for the financial and
geopolitical interests of their masters who started these pointless
wars and coups in the first place).
Ceasing to interfere in countries we know nothing about, will in
no way make it more difficult for us to rescue threatened peoples
in other countries when they ask Americans for help. The way you help
people like that, is not to put more weapons into the hands of
militant groups in their country who want to destroy both the duly
elected government and terrorize the general populace into
submission.
If people are coming into the U.S. with communicable diseases, then
they should be treated, cured, and allowed in as soon as they're
better, not turned away simply because they're sick. Part of the
reason why some immigrants come here is due to America's high quality
of medical care. I hope that teams of doctors are headed to the
border; they will really need those doctors once I.C.E. decides to
shoot a bunch of non-violent immigrants for walking across an
imaginary line in the sand.
The fear of disease has been used for generations to justify
excluding refugees. Since the 1930s, in regards to immigrants from
Mexico, for example. In the 1930s, even until years after the
typhus outbreak had ended in Mexico, immigrants entering at the El
Paso / Ciudad Juarez port of entry were subjected to harsh, noxious,
even toxic chemicals, as a way to rid them of lice and typhus. One of
the chemicals used against these immigrants included Zyklon-B, which
just a decade later was used by the Nazis to “exterminate” Jewish
people and other so-called “undesirables”. Anyone wishing to
learn more about this, can look up the term “Bath Riots” in any
library card catalog or internet search engine.
The
idea that most immigrants are probably carrying some disease, almost
always comes along with the idea that immigrants are
a
disease. Hitler compared Jewish people to rats and parasites, in the
same way that wealthy conservatives call poor people parasites
because they're having difficulty supporting themselves.
Additionally, Hitler compared Judaism, Marxism, and Bolshevik
communism to cancers and tumors and diseases.
This
is textbook dehumanization. Comparing Jewish people to parasites who
need to be “exterminated” is just another example. But assuming
that Hispanic immigrants might be carrying intestinal parasites, or
avian flu or swine flu – or to call them all rapists, dogs,
animals, sub-human, filth, or to call mixed-race people (even
ourselves)
"mongrels" and "mutts" - is to reduce human
beings to the level of animals and parasites. That is exactly what
Nazis did to the peoples they perceived as their political and racial
enemies.
We must learn the lessons of the Holocaust. One of those lessons is
that we should be careful not to echo the Nazi rhetoric of
dehumanization. History shows us that if you dehumanize people, or
even just call them “barbaric” (or assume they're uncivilized
just because they're not as industrially advanced as we are), then
there's no telling what horrors you might be willing to inflict on
them, and excusing it based on the idea that they're not human, so
it's OK for them to suffer treatment worthy of dogs. If you use
dehumanizing rhetoric, then eventually someone will claim that you
are less than human, and use that idea to try to treat you
like an animal or a parasite or a disease.
As the story goes, “They came for the trade-unionists, and I did
not speak out, because I was not a trade-unionist. Then they came for
the socialists... and I did not speak out... then they came for
the Jews. ...Then they came for me, and there was nobody left to
speak out for me.” Whether legal or illegal; Jewish or Arab or
Hispanic; born in America, or just the son of an immigrant; I
would like to see everyone who is not a perfectly white
Christian law-abiding citizen, unite, to say “We tolerate each
other's differences, we agree to disagree, and we won't submit to the
fascists' plan to force us all to assimilate to a hyper-patriotic,
racist culture that obeys all laws even unto the pain of death.
We all know immigrants who we love. Some of your parents might have
even come here illegally, and I don't blame them for doing that; just
because it's against the law, doesn't mean that it's wrong. Some of
you might have even known someone who was on the U.S.S. St. Louis
(the ship full of Jewish refugees), and they learned first-hand
what America does when it thinks it has no obligation to accept
refugees. It turns them away, hoping that some other country will
deal with the problem; and then 50 to 80 years later it elects Bush
Sr. and Bush Jr., the son and grandson of Nazi war profiteer Prescott
Bush, who represented German industrialist Fritz Thyssen's American
interests, while Thyssen was also funding slave labor camps in East
Germany (under the guise of making investments in steel and synthetic
rubber, and the like). Some of those camps were converted into death
camps after the inmates were worked nearly to death.
Those who do not learn from history will be doomed to repeat it. As
a student of history, I cannot stand idly by while listening to the
children of Holocaust survivors make excuses for the Mussolini
admirer Donald Trump, and promote an openly fascist, exclusionary,
white nationalist ideology, apparently because they think that will
spare them the hatred of American white Christian racists who make no
special exception for Jewish people in their hatred of everyone who
isn't like them.
Topic #4: New Rules Planned for Asylum Seekers
Topic #4: New Rules Planned for Asylum Seekers
Question #4:
“...The Trump Administration is moving ahead with a plan to limit
when and where foreign nationals can apply for asylum at the U.S.
border with Mexico.
...The administration will publish a new rule aimed at pushing
asylum seekers to already crowded border crossings and deny the
opportunity to apply for asylum nearly all immigrants caught crossing
the border illegally.
...Critics said the rule oversteps the president's legal authority
to change immigration law...
...What are your thoughts and comments concerning the immigrants,
the caravans seeking asylum, and the crises at our border?”
Answer #4:
The second paragraph of the introduction to this issue says it all:
“The administration will publish a new rule aimed at pushing asylum
seekers to already crowded border crossings and deny the opportunity
to apply for asylum nearly all immigrants caught crossing the border
illegally.”
What this says to me is that the Trump Administration wants to
make it harder for people to get in legally (by
imposing new limitations on where and when people can apply for
asylum). They are doing nothing to make good on their promise to make
it easier for people to come in legally.
And if they're “pushing asylum seekers to already crowded border
crossings”, then they're pretty much inviting them to those
crowded border crossings, which they will most likely cross
illegally, which they're doing because they've been wandering through
the desert desperate for food and water, not because they hate
America.
The Trump Administration wants to make it harder to come in
illegally. This effectively pressuring immigrants to come in
illegally, because that's the only other realistic alternative
(besides returning to a country where they're virtually assured to
die at the hands of drug gangs). This policy will only funnel them to
those ports of entry, where American officials can round them up and
deport them more efficiently and quickly. But choking an entry port
with illegal immigrants is also going to result in more
bloodshed and violence at the border, because we're not focusing on
creating a simple path to citizenship that isn't humiliating,
invasive, or which orders immigrants to check their language, their
flag, and their culture at the door to the country, and abandon their
identity on the way in.
The Trump Administration is raising and changing its standards for
no reason and with little notice. Immigrants sometimes wait as long
as several decades to get into this country. Just as it did
during World War II, America now has immigration quotas that it's not
fulfilling, even though these people are fleeing real threats and
totalitarian governments (some of which America has supported).
Tens of thousands of Syrian civilians died in 2016, America had room
for several thousand from that country, yet we let in only eleven
people from that war-ravaged country. A country whose sovereign
government our government is trying to ouster, which risks
throwing his people into the hands of I.S.I.S. and other extremist
groups.
The inscription at the foot of the Statue of Liberty specifically
says that “wretched refuse” (that is, human garbage, human filth,
trash, etc.) is welcome on our shores. No human being is garbage, but
Lady Liberty accepts anyone and everyone who is unfortunate enough to
be called garbage, and who gets dehumanized in this way. I
want “human garbage” to feel more accepted in America than
control-freak racist Nazi sympathizers who want to dehumanize others.
If that makes me unpatriotic, then so be it.
When I see my president making people feel pressured to return to
their old countries, while also depriving them of the means to do so
- by making it harder for them to leave or enter, by making it hard
for them to earn a decent wage so they can afford the trip, and by
limiting their rights to work and travel – it reminds me of the
steps that Hitler took to trap non-Germans in his country while
taunting them with the illusion that they were free to leave at any
time. They weren't.
I urge anyone who suspects that some of my concerns are valid, to speak to any
immigrants they have in their family. Go to them, find out whether
your parents and grandparents have ever renounced their eligibility
to claim citizenship in their former nations. Photocopy their foreign
birth certificates, and their proof of American citizenship. You may
need this information once Donald Trump decides to deport everybody
whose ancestors came here after 1920, or everybody whose parents or
immigrants, or whatever he's planning.
I know that I'm young, and young people exaggerate, and I shouldn't
compare other events to the Holocaust because I risk trivializing
that event by comparing it to something else. But as a student of
history, and as someone who is pretty good at detecting patterns, I
am saying all this because I want to prevent a potential
humanitarian catastrophe from becoming as bad as the
Holocaust. The more that Jewish people say “Obey the law” and
“Just come in illegally”, the more they will excuse the idea that
the government and the police are always right, even when they're
being run by openly racist people with totalitarian goals.
I happen to know two police officers who live in my area, both of
whom are around retirement age, whom I overheard discussing Hitler's
rationale for eliminating Jewish people, I believe, talking
about it as if it were a good thing, or at least a reasonable one.
“Sympathetic” would not be an inappropriate word to describe what
I heard. I believe that in most places in America, the kinds of
people who become police officers are usually the ones who are
excited to find excuses to beat up non-whites, whom have
unfortunately been impoverished and discriminated against by our
society into a state of having little alternatives to heavily
regulated legal work, other than to resort to stealing to make ends
meet, and sometimes even to violence in order to get away with that
theft. Make no mistake, there are Nazi sympathizers in the
police force, even in blue states.
Additionally, the fact that Trump's actions, such as this one, are
routinely criticized as overstepping his authority as
president, and overstepping the bounds of the Constitution, proves
that Trump has no respect for the rule of law, or our system of
checks and balances. For Donald trump to say that police should take
people's guns away, and then “go through due process”, is
an affront to American values and the American way of life, much
more than any immigrant could ever be, no matter how many drugs,
guns, or diseases he has on him. Donald Trump is the last
person in the world who should be lecturing other people about
the need to obey the law.
Topic #5: The Exit of Jeff Sessions
Question #5:
“...Jeff Sessions, the departing attorney general, leaves as
gracious as ever, and doesn't regret his controversial recusal.
...Mr. Sessions's conservative critics argued that he should have
investigated misuse of surveillance warrants to spy on former Trump
campaign adviser Carter Page and the FISA Court warrants that
allegedly were gotten illegally to wiretap him by the FBI. His
recusal compromised his leadership of the department and made it
harder to exert supervision over the FBI.
...Did Jeff Sessions bring on his own demise by recusing himself
from supervising Mr. Mueller's Russian collusion probe?”
Answer #5:
I don't agree with all of Jeff Sessions's views; particularly race
relations or marijuana legalization. But I have to commend him for
recusing himself from the Russian collusion probe, since he would
have stood to directly benefit if such collusion happened. I do not
claim to know for sure whether such collusion occurred.
I agree with those who say Sessions was right to recuse himself, but
I also agree with those who say he should have investigated
the alleged spying on Carter Page. I wouldn't vote for Sessions to be
president, but I believe that we need more public officials
who are not willing to lie and cheat and break the law in
order to make their party or their president look good.
Sessions may not be a perfect servant of Trump, but disagreement in
the executive branch is a sign of freedom and healthy disagreement.
It might make America look unstable, but if you read the Tao Te
Ching, you'll know that if you're too stable and unwavering,
then you become brittle and stiff, and you break, instead of being
and being pliable and amenable to change.
Sessions is putting ethics ahead of his own need to advance his
career. Additionally, he is putting the public's need for a fair,
impartial investigation, ahead of his fidelity to the people who want
to pretend they gave him his job. But Trump didn't give him
his job; the American people did, in the form of the United
States Senate. Sessions is showing more loyalty to the American
people and due process of law than he is showing to the president,
and for good reason: the American people are the ones who are paying
his salary. Trump just wants to take credit.
Sessions knows that he is not perfect, and that a certain segment of
voters will always need him to prove that he is trustworthy. His
recusal was his way of saying, “Hey, I'm playing by the same rules
as everybody else. Nobody is above the law; not me, not the
president, not anybody.” I'm infinitely more concerned about
whether Sessions did enough to investigate the new
administration, than I am about whether he is loyalty to a president
for whom I have no respect (because he has no respect for me, nor for
the rule of law).
Topic #6: Will it Be Gridlock for the Republicans for the Next Two
Years After the Split Congress?
Question #6:
“Divided power in Washington means two years of policy gridlock
where new bills and anti-growth policies will not pass.
...As for policy, Mr. Trump will need Mrs. Pelosi to pass NAFTA 2.0,
raise the debt ceiling, and negotiate a budget. She will try to
extract policy concessions, such as tax increases to pay for public
works.
...Your thoughts about what's in store for the next two years for
both parties?”
Answer #6:
“With a Republican-dominated Senate and a Democrat-controlled
House, this means that Trump will continue to have little to no
obstacles to his judicial appointments. It also means that we'll see
Trump vetoing a lot of legislation that the Democratic House will
propose.
I predict that this will lead to two things: 1) even more
controversial Supreme Court picks over the next two summers, which
will result in waves of protest (most likely over either social
issues or health policy), and 2) more partisan political squabbles
over “the power of the purse” (that is, the spending power, which
the Democrats now control).
I believe that the push for Pelosi to be reinstated as Speaker of
the House – as well as the push for Hillary Clinton to run again in
2020 (as well as Joe Biden, for that matter) – will continue, full
steam ahead. And this, despite obvious indicators that the
Democratic Party is moving to the left, despite indicators
that their leaders' open embrace of Wall Street and capitalism is
turning-off young people, and turning-off workers who live in the
Rust Belt states (which voted for Obama and Sanders, but picked Trump
over Clinton).
Believe it or not, there is a way to balance the budget, increase
revenues, reduce taxes, and promote growth without promoting
destruction of the environment, all at the same time. It's called
Land Value Taxation. Have all levels of government work together to
make sure local governments aren't squeezing so much out of their
residents in property taxes that there's no tax money left over for
the “higher” levels of government (state and federal).
Do that, simplify the tax code, and legally mandate balanced
budgets. If the lawmakers can't balance the budget, then fire them,
cut their pay, cut their pensions, cut their benefits, and impose
term limits. Between 90 and 98 percent of congressmen are re-elected;
only drastic measures like the ones I have mentioned will do anything
to hold them accountable to the people they supposedly represent.
Land Value Taxation will provide people freedom of opportunity,
without giving them handouts. It will help make government more
local, and more often voluntary, while devolving most decisions to
the communities they impact the most. It is a way to fund government
that does not involve stealing from taxpayers solely in order to
funnel that money into already well entrenched business elites, based
on the idea that that will help create jobs for the taxpayers from
whom they have just stolen. Finally, Land Value Taxation will, most
importantly, provide a way to promote jobs and productivity, without
putting the environment or the bottom lines of the working
poor at risk.
If we want the working poor to survive, we need to stop taxing
people who live below the poverty line, we need to stop giving their
money to “job-creators” who are already rich and don't
need that money, and we need to stop pretending that it's fine
for their bosses to make 500 times as much as they do, while there
are people working forty hours a week or more, yet still have to
resort to seeking government assistance just to make ends meet. The
existence of a social safety net may feel like a comfort and a
consolation, but the existence of the social safety net only makes
employers feel OK with giving their workers less than they need to
survive, because they assume that the government will always fill-in
the gaps. Even now, Republicans are working to dismantle that
social safety net, mistakenly interpreting each new person thrown off
of Food Stamps as a success, because the administration assumes that
the person must be off nutritional assistance now, because
they probably no longer need it. It is an understatement to say that
that is not always the case.
I fully expect Nancy Pelosi to be elected Speaker, and I expect a
NAFTA 2.0 and another debt ceiling increase, and I think that all of
those things are bad ideas. The Democrats will propose only those
bills which they know the Republicans will support; that is, the ones
which increase the president's war budget, increase the amount of
money spent on Wall Street, increase the amount which can be spent on
relief for farmers (essentially as an apology for Trump's tariff
strategy, which predictably failed, and predictably resulted in
demands from other industries to be subsidized).
If the Democratic Party insists on destroying itself, I will not
stop it. Nancy Pelosi sent a clear message to me in 2006 when she
vowed not to pursue George W. Bush on impeachment, just as she has
sent a clear message that she will not pursue Trump for
impeachment. Trump, who openly flaunts the rule of law. George W.
Bush, the grandson of a war profiteer, and who started two
unconstitutional wars, not authorized by the people through the
Congress, against two countries that had not attacked the United
States.
Pelosi refused to impeach Bush, whose invasion of Iraq resulted in
the use of weaponized depleted uranium on the people of Fallujah,
resulting in mutations such as babies being born with one eye in the
center of their heads. Bush deserves to pay for his war crimes, and
Nancy Pelosi is sending a clear message that Trump's Mussolinian
fascism, and Bush's Nazi war profiteer past, are perfectly welcome in
the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, which fought in a coalition
to stop Hitler and Mussolini from conquering the world.
I became a Libertarian the year after the Democrats retook the House
in 2006, the year Pelosi said that Bush would get a free pass. I
could no longer call myself a Democrat, not even a progressive one.
The Bill of Rights mattered to much for me, even at the age of 19. I
knew then that what both parties were doing was wrong, and I
still feel that way.
I refuse to vote for state or national -level candidates of either
party, until their leadership does something to show that they are
unwilling to compromise with Republicans on issues like
unlimited handouts for Wall Street, assimilation of immigrants,
unreasonable immigration restrictions, unwarranted wiretaps and
domestic surveillance of citizens, the militarization of local police
departments through the use of drones and tanks on our streets, and
the continued criminalization of a harmless drug (the non-violent
possession of which currently claims one million incarcerated
people who could be out taking care of their families and
creating jobs for people).
These are all issues which Democrats have been all too
happy to help Republicans implement, as long as the Democrats get
a small rider that guarantees them some imaginary, temporary,
probably unfunded goodies that distract them from the need to have a
society that respects people regardless of their ability to fill out
form after form to beg the government for permission to exercise
control over their own property, their own households, and their own
lives.
Topic #7: The Price of Medicare for All, or Bernie-Care
Question #7:
“...Medicare for “All”... would finance health care
through taxes instead of insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays.
...As in every socialist system, the real “savings” would come
from the price controls and wait lists for many health care services.
...Get in line... which may take a year or more. ...Single-payer
represents a big threat, and insurers are far too entrenched in
Congress to lose the battle... Your thoughts and comments re:
“Medicare for All”?”
Answer #7:
ObamaCare is not socialist-inspired legislation; it was
inspired by the health policies of Republican governors Tim
Pawlenty and Mitt Romney (when it was called PawlentyCare and
RomneyCare).
“Price controls” alone do not necessarily indicate a socialist.
The Nazis imposed price controls too. In fact, they did it under
the guise of socialism. They called it “war socialism”. War
socialism is not real socialism, just like the “national
socialism” term used by the Nazis was a trick designed to dupe
socialists into believing that they wanted equality. The only people
they wanted equality or freedom for was the German people, they left
a full 20% of their society out of their “socialist”
dream.
To call price controls “socialist” - whether you mean it as a
good thing or a bad thing – effectively amounts to giving-in to,
and agreeing with, the Nazi propaganda that price controls are
representative of what a socialist economy is supposed to look like.
Command-and-control economics is what defined both the Soviet Union
and the Nazis. They both had price controls. They both imposed
rationing in order to make efficient use of materials to support the
war effort. Guess what... so did the United States! We had
rationing and price controls here too. I do not support single-payer
health care, nor do I support price controls. But you cannot
criticize price controls as socialist, when if you knew anything
about socialism, you would know that most socialists would eventually
like to abolish the need for pricing and money in the first
place. If they succeed, then price controls won't be viewed as
necessary. Socialists have no reason to support a monetary and
pricing system that they believe only serves to impose a state of
destitution and inequality upon them.
We live in a capitalist system with a large social safety net, not
a socialist system. No matter how large the social safety net is, the
mere fact that it is large does not make it socialist, as long as
private property ownership still exists and is fully legal, and, at
that, protected and insured with the help of the government. The mere
fact that ObamaCare still exists, should not be taken as proof that
we live in a socialist country. The essence of socialism is either
worker control, or democratic decision-making, or inclusion of all
of society in the decision-making. ObamaCare was pushed through
without regard as to whether it was constitutional, affordable,
beneficial to workers, or whether it was even a public option or a
single-payer proposal in the first place. The mere fact that it is a
“public works” does not prove that it is worker-controlled, or
that it operates in the interest of the broadest swath of society
that our lawmakers could manage to consult.
If we had a socialist health system, then the profit incentive in health
insurance would completely cease to exist. I'm not a socialist, but I
think it should cease to exist; there are non-profit charities
and humanitarian organizations that could step in to fund health
insurance for the poor, without inviting the government to get
involved, and rob all of us to pay for it. I also believe that
government is pressuring us into choosing for-profit forms of
insurance, because non-profits don't have to pay taxes, so the more
people choose non-profit health providers, the less tax revenue the
government gets from taxing the profits of the health industry. The
way the government is being run right now, the government has
literally no incentive to help people afford health care and health
insurance. That's because if you solve that problem, you eliminate
the artificial need for the existence of the branch of government
that pretends to solve that problem but does nothing about it.
Nobody wanted ObamaCare, it had to be forced on us, through what is
openly being called the individual mandate. It is mandatory.
It's force. It's a bailout of the private insurance companies, in the
name of socialism. Single-payer will give us more of the same thing,
except it will be more confusing, because all the money will be
lumped together into one pool, so Democrats will depict every attempt
to save those funds and spend them wisely, as an attempt to lower the
total amount being spent, which they will characterize as robbery,
even when it is done out of a genuine concern for the fiscal
stability of the country. Democrats have stooped to this same
irrational, emotionally manipulative fear-mongering, and I hope that
Democratic voters will not continue to fall for it.
The social safety net is something that the capitalist system gives
to workers, to make them satisfied with the condition of servitude
that they're in, and to make them satisfied with capitalism. They do
this in hopes that this will eventually cause far-left Democrats to
call for socialism, because the social safety net isn't doing
a good enough job. ObamaCare is not socialism; it's a
capitalist tool designed to get people to stop complaining, to stop
wanting a better quality of life for themselves and their children,
to stop asking to be treated equally at the hospital just because
they can't afford to pay (even though doctors take oaths to
treat people regardless of their ability to pay).
Doctors and patients alike are increasingly realizing that health
insurance companies are middlemen, who get in the way of the
efficiency, equality, and confidentiality of the doctor-patient
relationship. The same could be said about our government, which
orders us to buy that health insurance, and then pretends like
that's going to help them lower prices, instead of just jack-up the
premiums every year while demanding more and more taxpayer bailouts.
People who are sick don't need health insurance, they need
health care. Just like a person whose house is on fire doesn't
need fire insurance, they need someone to put out the fire.
It does no good to insure against something that has already
happened, so being pressured to buy insurance after the problem has
already appeared is just an unnecessary expense that distracts from
the real problem.
Insuring anything only serves to convince people that they
can be as reckless as they want with it, and that government and the
taxpayers will always foot the bill to compensate for whatever
thoughtless thing people want to do with their bodies, or their cars,
or their guns. This creates a culture of irresponsibility, and
needlessly welcoming the insurance industry and insurance legislation
into our lives.
Anyone who wants the government to force all American citizens to
pay into the same insurance pool, should be wary that they may be
welcoming other people to control their health decisions, based on
the idea that they're paying for it, so they get a say in the matter.
We can have an egalitarian health system without resorting to
redistribution; all we have to do is let people know it's not OK to
be pressured into making economic decisions that benefit solely other
people, and having free choice in health care and insurance
markets, not corporate welfare for the already wealthy insurers
and pharmaceutical companies, paid for through legalized theft from
taxpayers.
Topic #8: Anti-Semitism “Appears to Be Intensifying” in the U.S.
Question #8:
“...The Anti-Defamation League [reported a] 57% increase in
anti-Semitic incidents from the previous year. ...many synagogues and
Jewish day schools have been amping up security measures. ...What do
you think is contributing to the increase of anti-Semitism, not just
in the U.S. but also around the world?”
Answer #8:
I think that one of the chief contributing causes of anti-Semitism
in recent years, has been the increase in acceptability of the hatred
of other ethnic minorities. I feel that Trump and his
loyalists have been stoking the flames of xenophobia, and hatred of
immigrants, since his campaign began. They have created an
environment where questioning people's loyalty to this country is
always acceptable, in which nobody has the right to speak their own
native language without having to undergo extreme, invasive measures
to prove to police that they are not foreign spies.
Frankly, I would be missing something if I neglected to mention that
the Democrats have made it easier for Republicans to
hate on immigrants, with the Democrats' demonization of all things
Russian (almost as if to re-ignite the Red Scare which the
Republicans started 55 years ago), and with their mockery of
Trump's German last name. This is a desperate attempt by the
Democrats to seem patriotic, but they're just stoking
nationalistic hatred against all Russians and Germans by doing these
things. The Democrats should not be complimented just for choosing to
hate white nations for no good reason instead of non-white
nations.
In a sense, it was only a matter of time before the wave of
anti-immigrant sentiment came to envelop Jewish people in addition to
other ethnic minorities. Indeed, I believe that Robert Bowers (the
alleged shooter at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh) did what
he did because he believed – to repeat, he believed this,
not me - that Tree of Life and H.I.A.S. (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid
Society) were part of a vast Jewish-Arab-Hispanic conspiracy to
disobey American law, flood America with immigrants, and have Jewish
Democrat politicians tempt Donald Trump away from true conservatism.
Aside from that shooting, and in general, I believe that the main
reason Jewish people are being chosen as targets is because it's no
longer acceptable in America – at least while in the company of the
51% of us who are Republicans - to be anything less than a white
Christian conservative American citizen with a full-time job,
wealthy, and in perfect standing with the law, who additionally
sucks up to the power elite. So obedient to the law, some of
them, that they will not even consider violating the law, or
orders, even when it violates their conscience. You could call
that a patriot, but patriot or not, it's also a psychopath, because
psychopaths have no conscience (nor empathy, for that matter).
Many of these people openly embrace, and often promote, the idea
that a person who obeys authority is somehow “protected” by God,
even if they die, even if they do something wrong in the process.
Some steadfast Christians who are control freaks – I repeat, some;
not all of them, just the worst of them - are so willing to
believe that all orders come from God, that they are willing
to encourage people to become victims, tell them that they're
protected and safe, allow them to die, and take credit for pretending
to help them.
As much as I support many of the principles in the Constitution, I
have to agree with those who have said that our Constitution has been
powerless to prevent the chain of excesses and abuses of power which
have allowed this to happen. The Constitution has failed to
sufficiently limit the power of the president, and the last fifty
years of history have shown us that our Congress will needlessly hand
its duly-delegated powers over to the president, even when the
president isn't asking for that much power (Note: I'm referring
to Richard Nixon's veto of the War Powers Resolution, which was
overridden).
We the voters, and our foolish faith in the Constitution, have
allowed this racist psychopath to take over our airwaves; have
allowed this despotic president to whip us all into a race-baiting,
war-mongering frenzy of calling the cops on our neighbors, instead of
banding together against him in the name of embracing and respecting
each other's differences, which is not only our last chance at social
cohesion, but maybe also the survival of the planet.
We should be arming ourselves and providing for the security and
well-being of our families, not obsessing over what some idiotic
billionaire casino owner who likes to fire people - who can't get by
without stealing from all 320 million of us at once – is going to
order us to do next. We are free individuals, freedom is all you need
to fight a successful revolution, and a free individual does not wait
around playing guessing games about what we could do to make
the president less mad at us, as if all 320 million of us
belong in jail, instead of him.
Donald Trump and his loyalists are making people of all kinds,
cultures, heritages, and religions feel unwelcome in this
country. No matter whether they were born here, no matter if they did
come in legally (because white people can still get away with
calling the cops on Puerto Ricans who wave the flag of Puerto Rico,
which is U.S. territory, not a foreign nation). My grandmother
was born in Italy and she doesn't know where her Social Security card
is. This terrifies me, as someone who sees Trump saying things that I
last heard coming out of the mouths of Mussolini and Hitler. I
believe that if Trump gets to revoke birthright citizenship and
repeal the 14th Amendment, then the next step will be to
revoke the citizenship of people whose parents or grandparents
weren't born here. And that includes the vast majority of us.
Many people in this country will never stop seeing Jewish people as
foreigners, as non-white, as rejecting Jesus. Many people in this
country will continue to blame Jewish people for killing
Jesus, or even to doubt the loyalty of Jewish people because they
suspect that they might have more loyalty to the State of Israel than
to the United States. It is unfortunate that there are so many
racists in America. But wishing that this were not so, does not
absolve us of the responsibility to take adequate preparations for
the possible scenario of anti-Semitic pogroms, possibly even
including racist or Nazi-sympathetic elements of the police (rogue
police or not).
I hope that more Jewish people will consider doing what Israelis
have done to protect their own security interests: arm most citizens.
I do not think that a draft is necessary to achieve that, but I do
hope to see more Jewish Americans come to value their right to bear
arms. I feel the same way about liberals, Democrats, and ethnic and
religious minorities of all kinds who think that Democratic gun
control measures are going to stop racists from targeting them. If
the Republicans can win an election and change who's allowed to have
a gun, they're going to take guns away from everyone who's not a
solid white Christian patriot.
I would like to urge Jewish Americans to join the interest group
J.P.F.O. (Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership). That
group aims to spread the message that Senator Chris Dodd Sr. helped
spearhead the modern call for increased gun control legislation back
in the mid 20th century, when he evidently took
inspiration from the Nazi model of gun control. The Nazis, by
the way, curtailed the right of non-Germans to travel, but curtailed
less the right of Germans to travel, to make it seem fair.
They also increased restrictions on the Jews' right to
bear arms, while loosening restrictions on ethnic Germans'
right to bear arms; do not allow yourself to be fooled by those who
claim that Germany had a general loosening of restrictions.
That loosening only applied to Germans.
I am a Libertarian. I embrace free market ideals. I am open to
conservative and right-wing ideas, as long as they are conducive to
freedom and independence. But I simply cannot endorse the idea that
continuing to obey authority, or obey the law, is going to make it
any easier for us. You – immigrant or not, Jewish or not - are
being given a choice again between being peacefully murdered,
violently murdered, or fighting your way free.
If I were to go back to Nazi Germany, and tell Jewish people under
Nazi rule, that they ought to “respect authority”, and “do what
the police say, and they won't mess with you too much”, who would I
be talking about? I would be encouraging people to obey Nazis. You
may wish to call them “Nazi sympathizers dressed in police
uniforms”, but that describes a literal Nazi as well. I don't wish
to help order people into death camps. Distrust of authority is
healthy, and if an authority is responsible and duly authorized, then
it should be able to survive answering a few questions before it
resorts to violence and brutal repression (including of people who
are just trying to find out what horrible things their tax money is
being spent on).
Your legislatures and your police forces have been taken over by
Nazi sympathizers who don't respect your individual right to defend
yourself, because they want to pretend it threatens national
security, instead of just threatening their power to control you; to
order you to work yourself to death or else fuck-off out of the
country. Do not trust the police to protect you, and do not
let your children grow up thinking that the police, or the president,
are always right.
No state can be trusted to protect Jewish people. How many
dozens of European countries have banned Jewish people at one time or
another over the centuries? Plenty of Jewish people have gone on to
be anarchists: Noam Chomsky, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman. Ludwig
von Mises and Murray Rothbard, Jewish libertarians, admitted that we
could live without the state.
Jewish people are under no obligation to obey the law unto the pain
of death. They are not now, and they were not under Nazi rule. Jewish
law obligates Jewish people to defend themselves, and there have been
midrashim written which interpret Jewish law as meaning that
when G-d made the covenant with the Jewish people, He also
commanded them to obey the laws of their host nations, but
additionally commanded all the nations of the world to
refrain from treating the Jews in a harsh or unreasonable manner.
Jewish Americans, just like any other people in America, have every
right to arm themselves, and even to disobey laws that seriously
violate their conscience. But it is getting increasinly difficult to
do both of those things, and I blame politicians who support
gun control and support increased restrictions on free speech and
freedom of the press.
Peaceful disobedience of unjust laws founded this country at the
Boston Tea Party. That tradition continued with the Reverend Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.. Today, the Libertarian Party wholly embraces
the peaceful disobedience of laws that violate one's personal
conscience. But free people are under no obligation to remain
“peaceful” in the face of constant threats and provocations.
Being in America does not obligate you to be a mouthpiece for
American fascism and racism, nor for the anti-immigrant sentiment and
xenophobia whose spread helps make these things seem normal by
comparison. You do not have to hate on illegal immigrants just
because you had the patience and the money and the connections to
come in legally, and they didn't. You have no right to close the door
on refugees when American immigration quotas from countries with
humanitarian catastrophes are being nowhere near fulfilled;
humanitarian catastrophes which our country is partly to blame
for. That hatred is coming back to bite Jewish Americans in the ass,
because they are unfortunate enough to be in America at the height of
a race-baiting epidemic, when racists hate all kinds of
immigrants, and don't care enough to distinguish which ones are
Jewish and which ones are not.
Last year, a racist put a piece of pork on the handle of a doorway
of a Muslim mosque. Should we assume that, just because this man
targeted Muslims instead of Jews, that he is above
perpetrating the same type of vandalism upon a synagogue, to mock the
Jews for their dietary restrictions in the same way? How hard
do you think it would be to get Donald Trump to pay the legal bills
of anybody who leaves a piece of pork on the doorstep of a mosque? If
he did that, how much would you be willing to bet that if someone
vandalized a synagogue with pork the next day, Trump would
pretend he had nothing to do with creating the environment that said
it's perfectly acceptable to treat religious minorities that way.
Twenty or thirty years ago in New York City, a Hasidic Jewish man
was attacked by a racist for speaking Yiddish or Hebrew on his cell
phone. Racists don't care what language you're speaking, they just
want to attack you if it's not English (or German, or whatever
language they want to force people to speak).
I want all people in America to feel free to use their native
language, and practice any part of their religion that doesn't
directly call for violence against non-believers (and all three
Abrahamic faiths do that, just in different amounts). But ethnic
and religious minorities should keep in mind that some people may
want to hurt them for doing it, and that the police will not always
be nearby to rush to their defense. They might even think that they
have more important things to do. Sometimes the cops even defend
anti-racist protesters from gangs of white racist thugs. The cops
get a free pass for this, because some people are foolish enough to
label all anti-racist protesters as belonging to “Antifa”, which
people pretend is a terrorist group, rather than the only people who
are actively engaging openly racist white people in overt warfare
(which is what racists deserve).
The police care much more about getting paid, than doing their job.
They cannot even be held legally responsible for failing to protect
anyone who doesn't directly pay them for that protection. The police
are, in effect, a mafia, which has legalized its own crimes, and
turned its documentation of its own crimes into a basis for law. The
police do not care about keeping individuals safe from harm,
especially not if it's a small minority of people whom they
could easily stand to lose without risking too much of their
paycheck.
Individuals must remain well-armed if we are to guard against
perhaps the greatest horror of the twentieth century – a horror
with many faces, many dictators as its facades – the deliberate and
willfully negligent murder of hundreds of millions of people at the
hands of the governments which were instituted, ironically, to
preserve their freedoms and protect their lives. We are fools
if we think that any country that has ever banned Jews – or anybody
else – could not easily do it again.
An increase in the number of Jewish politicians, or of Jewish police
officers, would not guarantee that Jewish people would be protected,
because there will always be politicians who want to sell their
constituents the illusion of safety. Democrats, for example,
do this by telling their constituents, Jews included, to hand their
guns over to the racist Donald Trump. Then the Republicans say he
needs these guns to protect you from the Muslims. Meanwhile, the
government stockpiles more weapons for itself, passes more laws that
gives racist governments the right to deny non-whites the
right to bear arms in order to defend themselves, and makes secret
plans to draft us all again. How these young people are supposed to
fight wars overseas without any guns is beyond me.
That's why I can't support the Democrats. They've shown themselves
all too willing to push-through whatever the Republicans want them
to, and then to let the G.O.P. Call their own idea socialist just
because the Democrats realized that it was the only way to get
Republicans to stop complaining. Well, control freaks never
stop complaining. You don't just do whatever a control freak wants
you to just because you think it will upset them less. Control freaks
are not supposed to be obeyed, they're supposed to be confronted for
trying to run the lives of free independent people who they're
supposed to be getting along with.
It's very plain to me that Trump is baiting us against each other on
the basis of nationality, race, ethnicity, culture, and religion. As
much as I want to say that we should not allow him to divide us, the
Democrats have proven themselves to be equally incapable of
maintaining their affairs ethically or constitutionally enough to
deserve the reins of power. As Franklin said, freedom cannot be
bought with security. As Jefferson said, the price of freedom is
eternal vigilance.
I am concerned that President Trump is doing what Richard Spencer is doing; paying lip service to the State of Israel in order to make people believe that he couldn't possibly have an aversion to Jewish people. I also suspect that Trump is trying to use the lip service he pays
to Israel as leverage, and even his own daughter Ivanka's Judaism, to
distract from the fact that he once promulgated a Jewish stereotype
in an interview. Trump told an interviewer that he likes to hire “the
guys with the funny little hats” (or something like that) to handle
his money, because they're supposedly good with it. We should not
just chalk this off as a “positive stereotype”; positive
stereotypes are still harmful because they reduce all individuals to
caricatures of the culture they come from.
If this is what we are supposed to expect from the “leader
of the free world”, then we might as well abolish the office of the
president, and ask another country to invade us and depose our
democratically-elected leader, because we've got Nazis. After all, it
wouldn't be the first time we'd be supporting the ouster of a
sovereign government, so no solid American citizen can rightfully
tell me that such an action would be unprecedented, or even
inconsistent with American values.
“Never again”, they say. Never again should Jewish people
blindly trust any sovereign nation-state on this planet which has
ever banned any ethnic or religious minority from its
shores. Sure, wish for “never again” with one hand. But
also fight for “never again” with the other hand. I'm sorry if this means putting people at risk, or putting people in harm's way, by urging them to be willing to break the law if it is necessary to protect innocent lives. But the law is not always right, and it is not always on the side of preserving human life. People who know that will continue to fight bad governments in order to achieve a better world. That is the price that we pay for not putting severe limits on our government (which we create, not the other way around).
Written
on November 13th
and 14th,
2018
Published
on November 14th,
2018
