On
November 2nd, 2018, I attended a round-table political
discussion at the Highland Park Recreation Center in Highland Park,
Illinois. Ralph Bernstein moderated the event, and e-mailed his
questions to attendees prior to the event. Below are my responses to
the questions I cared to answer.
Question
#1
President
Donald Trump says he wants to order the end of the constitutional
right to citizenship for babies of non-citizens and unauthorized
immigrants born in the United States. The 14th
Amendment
provides that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen. Can a president,
by executive order, change a provision of the constitution? What
about changing the First Amendment regarding the press? Are such
orders constitutional? If so, what does that do to the presidency,
make the president “all powerful?” He has also said he wants to
change the 22nd
Amendment to allow a term for the president to be 16 years.
Answer
#1
Amending
the 14th,
or 1st,
amendment to the Constitution, cannot be done by the president. That
is the executive-branch equivalent of “legislating from the bench”;
legislation is Congress's
job. Executive orders only allow the president to make minor
recommendations
as to how the law should be enforced, not to dictate what the law is.
Amending an amendment requires
the approval of majorities of Congress and 3/4 of the states to
approve.
If
your goal is to stop aristocrats' and diplomats' children from
becoming American citizens and having too many privileges, then
you should be looking at the Emoluments Clause, not birthright
citizenship. I'm worried that if Trump goes after birthright
citizenship, the next thing he'll do is make it easier for the U.S.
government to recognize titles and honors from foreign governments.
As well as continuing
to do business with governments after you've formed a political
campaign; continuing down this route will likely result in a
“post-game” rationalization of the legality of what the Trump
campaign may have done in coordination with Russians.
The
current birthright citizenship controversy has nothing to do with
keeping our country safe, and it has everything to do with cementing
Trump's control and giving him dictatorial powers, which will
eventually result in any and
all
citizens (even those born here to citizen parents) being deported,
for any cause the president wishes.
Question
#2
When
the president uses the word that he is “a nationalist,” what does
he mean? Some say it’s a “dog whistle” about” white
supremacy” others say it’s just a patriotic expression. Is it
better to be a “nationalist” as the president says, or is
“globalism” a better way to think? Your thoughts?
Answer
#2
I
believe that Trump uses the term “nationalism” for several
reasons: primarily to evoke patriotism, and to promote the idea of
“American exceptionalism”. Trump wants you to think he believes
all nations should put
their own interests first (over other nations), but I think he's only
referring to the nations he likes; specifically, the white-majority
ones. Many worry – rightfully, I think - that “globalist” is
being used as racist code for “Jew”.
It's
not wrong to be patriotic, or to put your country's needs before the
needs of other countries. But Trump's brand of nationalism takes a
perfectly good principle – from an economic school of thought
called mercantilism – which says “each country should sell what
it makes best”, and he adds an unnecessary social element to it. He
attaches the idea that human beings
are mere “products” of their home countries, and if you look at
his “Mexican rapists” comment, he promotes the idea that these
people's governments are deliberately sending everyone
who's coming, and sending their
worst. Which makes them look like tools, with no free will of their
own. This is not only dehumanizing to foreigners, it also disparages
America because it
denies that an immigrant would have any reason of their own to come
here, like freedom or opportunity (which we barely even have
anymore).
Globalism
and nationalism, each, have good and bad things about them. I
encourage you to look up the term “alter-globalization”. Rather
than being simply anti-globalist,
alter-globalization
favors free travel, free exchange, and integration of economies
across the globe; but without endorsing
global governance,
imperialism, centralization, command-and-control economics, or
government-directed so-called “free” trade.
Real
free trade is possible, and if Trump wants zero tariffs, then he
should eliminate them, instead of trying to bully, mock, intimidate,
confuse, and humiliate foreign leaders into lowering theirs first.
Question
#3
There
are thousands of persons who are in Mexico walking to the U.S.
border. The president has said he will deploy 5,200 active-duty
troops to the border, in what officials
of his administration described as a necessary national security
measure. Is the deployment necessary or not? Can the military prevent
these persons from crossing the border? What about a claim for
amnesty by any of such persons? What would be done in this event?
Answer
#3
I
support amnesty for all migrants of whom there is no reasonable
suspicion of having committed a corpus delicti crime against real persons who can claim victimization, or against their justly
acquired property (please note that I did not say "legally" or "legitimately acquired property").
The notion that non-citizen undocumented immigrants and the children of foreign nationals have less rights (or no rights at all) while in the United States - predicated on the 14th Amendment's clause reading "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" - implies that immigrants are not subject to American laws either, which would imply that they cannot be legally deported. This argument against birthright citizenship is self-defeating; anyone on U.S. soil, including at an embassy, can, and of right ought to be able to, apply for U.S. citizenship. Foreign nationals may even be entitled to taxpayer-funded legal representation, so it would not even be accurate to say that their legal rights are fewer or lesser than those of U.S. citizens (at least not in a legal, technical sense; this is not to say that immigrants' legal rights are never ignored, quite the contrary).
The deployment of troops at the border to stop the
migrant caravan from entering is unnecessary. Additionally, the use
of military officers to enforce domestic policy is martial law, and
the use of federal officers to enforce domestic policy is
unconstitutional.
The
Posse Comitatus Act reads in part, “it
shall not be lawful to employ any part of the Army of the United
States, as a posse comitatus, or otherwise, for the purpose of
executing the laws, except in such cases and under such circumstances
as such employment of said force may be expressly authorized by the
Constitution or by act of Congress...”.
Subsequent
modifications of that law have resulted in the designation of
terrorist groups as people whom the president has some authority to
dispatch federal troops to act against. That is why it is being
claimed that members of al-Qaeda are present in the caravan. Not only
is there no evidence of this, the influx of Honduran immigrants can
be attributed to the C.I.A.'s recent backing of a coup there; this is
just more of “America's chickens coming home to roost”, we only
have ourselves to blame for this. If we don't want foreigners to come
here, then we should stop bombing their countries, rigging their
elections, and sabotaging their economies. Sure, it's possible, maybe
even likely,
that
George Soros is
funding the caravan. But people all around the world, who don't want
the people in the caravan to die on their way here, are sending help
too.
We
already have I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which has
only existed since 2003. America did without I.C.E. for 227 years, we
can do it again, and deportations can still be carried out even if
I.C.E. ceased to exist.
I.C.E.
is unconstitutional; the last thing we want to do is do is impose
martial law on top of it, which is not only unnecessary and
unconstitutional, it would also be a serious human rights violation,
that could accelerate with curfews for adults, travel restrictions,
conscripting young people into the military, relocation to
settlements “for our own safety”, forced labor, or much much
worse.
If
you support shooting people who cross the border, you are asking for
an international incident, for a war to start, for martial law, and
for a race war, as well as for the reputation, credibility, and moral
authority of the United States government and its citizens to be
ruined forever.
If
you want to go after al-Qaeda, don't go after the migrant caravan. Go
after the people who founded al-Qaeda. And I'm not talking about
Osama bin Laden, I'm talking about Carter, Reagan, and the Bushes.
Jimmy Carter, who started this thoughtless involvement in
Afghanistan, and agreed to find mujahideen ("freedom fighters") against the Soviets. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, who continued it.
Bush's son George W., who founded the oil company Arbusto 88 with
Salem bin Laden, the brother of Osama.
After
9/11, rumors surfaced that numerous members of the bin Laden family,
and other Saudi nationals, had been secretly airlifted out of the
country for their own protection. This appears to have been
denied by the National Commission on Terror Attacks, Snopes.com, and
Osama bin Laden's brother Yeslam, but in truth, the only things they
denied were the suggestions that the U.S. government helped, and that
it happened before U.S. airspace re-opened. Yeslam bin Laden told
Matt Lauer that it was the Saudi government, not the American
government, that helped his family fly out of the United States; and
that it occurred after airspace was re-opened, not before.
If
what bin Laden's brother said is the truth, then the Bushes would
have been in prime positions to help (if they wanted to). Either way,
the bin Ladens are among the wealthiest non-royals in Saudi Arabia,
so their ability to use their political influence to enlist America's
help conspiring to assist the Saudi government, and keep U.S.-Saudi
ties strong, should not be underestimated. Especially now, after the
murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the revelations about the
Saudi regime's brutal treatment of women and homosexuals (among
others).
Question
#4
What
role of the President’s warnings about
the caravan of migrants headed toward the U.S. border from Central
America played in inspiring the virulent anti-Semite who killed 11
people at a Pittsburgh synagogue and injured 4? Or was this person
going to do violence without the migrants coming here because of his
hatred toward Jews?
Answer
#4
I
believe that the shooter might not have chosen that particular
target (the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) if
fewer immigrants were coming to America. Immigration and Judaism
seemed to be two motivations for the attack, but there might be
additional motivations, and we don't know whether there was any
particular thing that was a “last straw” or a final trigger for
him, so that's why I think it would be unwise to point to just one or
two primary motivations.
If
what I have read about the shooter is true, then one of his
motivations was his belief that Donald Trump has been compromised in
his attempts to revive American nationalism, fight “globalism”,
and reduce immigration. It seems likely that the shooter would agree
with the statement that “liberal Democratic Jewish politicians are
behind a push for more immigration to the U.S.”, and that they are
responsible for compromising Trump. It would make sense if that line
of logic led him to select for his target a Jewish group that
supported immigrants and refugees.
Many
of the people who think that way, consider Jewish people non-white,
or as potentially disloyal to America; and many feel that immigrants
– Jews and Hispanics included – are part of a virus-like
“infestation” that puts our public health and our values at risk.
These notions are parts of a mindset that suspects Jewish people of
trying to divide all nations of the world against each other, make
dissimilar people live together, and compromise the genetic purity of
distinct nations through encouraging inter-breeding and increases in
the number of mixed-race people. Of course, this is textbook Nazi
propaganda, and I don't mean to rationalize it; I only mean to
explain how Nazi sympathizers think.
I
believe that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter chose the target he
did, because he believed that the organization was – in some way,
however directly or indirectly - providing material assistance (or at
least ideological support) for “the enemy”. That is to say, for
“the enemy”, as the shooter defines it. Generally, that
means foreign-born people, including the migrant caravan (which the
shooter likely believes is harboring terrorists). But as I've
explained, there's no
evidence for that; it's propagandist fear-mongering from the Trump
Administration, intended to allow the president to dispatch federal
troops to enforce domestic immigration law on the grounds that
al-Qaeda might be lurking around every corner, even behind every
immigrant.
We
shouldn't assume that the shooter could have been dissuaded from
doing what he did, if only there were fewer immigrants coming into
the U.S., or if fewer Jewish-Americans supported allowing more people
in. If fewer Jewish people approved of immigration, then sure, we
might see less
anti-Jewish violence from right-wingers, but we might also
see more anti-Jewish
violence, just coming from different people. That's because leftists,
and anti-racists, might see Jewish people strongly criticizing
immigration, and conclude from that, that the sentiment is motivated
by racism, or perhaps even by a belief in Jewish supremacy. If they
conclude the latter, then it is likely that they will come to associate
the Jewish religion with racism, violence, or both, and assume that all Jewish people are violent or racist. Coupled with the shooter's belief that H.I.A.S. (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)'s assistance of the migrant caravan constitutes material assistance to terrorists, it would be understandable if the shooter felt under attack; by al-Qaeda, with the cover of Hondurans, funding from wealthy Jewish liberals, and housing and employment assistance from H.I.A.S.. (a refugee assistance network of synagogues, in which Tree of Life participates).
I
say this not to rationalize racists' line of logic, but in order to
point out the worst things that left-wingers and right-wingers could
be thinking about the Jewish people. If you want to defeat your
enemy, you have to understand him. If your enemy tells you directly
to your face why he hates you and why he attacked you, then you can
disagree with the truth of those ideas, but to flat-out ignore them
is to carelessly assume that your enemy is irrational. People can be
full of hate, and hold opinions about people which are wholly
unreasonable, but still make rational decisions in the
battlefield. Don't underestimate your enemy by assuming that he is
simply crazy, or by assuming that racism is his sole motivation. His
reasons may seem backwards, and his logic may seem tortured and
convoluted, but admitting that your enemy makes rational decisions in
no way obligates you to accept or rationalize everything he says
and does. It helps you avoid underestimating the horrors and deception he's capable of.
Question
#5
What
has happened to the children who were separated from their parents?
Are they still held in these “cages”? Will they be released to
the custody of their parents, or what?
Answer
#5
I
have heard rumors that some of the children separated from their
parents have been essentially sold by the government to adoption
agencies. This concerns me, since I have heard horror stories about
emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of children; not only in the
hands of adoption agencies, but in the hands of I.C.E. themselves.
Not to mention police, soldiers, for-profit prisons, and teen boot
camps.
Some
of you may have seen the pictures of Obama's and Trump's Homeland
Security secretaries walking around in the I.C.E. detention
facilities; “family detention centers”, they call them. One
picture of the facilities showed a sign that said “males aged
16-18”. So they're separating people by gender, and by age, taking
parents away from children, and immigrants are having their religious
jewelry taken away. These facts should ring serious alarm bells for
anyone paying attention to history and the times they're living in.
If
those facts don't, by themselves, evoke memories of what happened to
Holocaust victims, then I implore you to look up “the Bath Riots”.
Back in the 1930s, immigrants on their way into El Paso (from Ciudad
Juarez, Mexico) were sprayed with harsh de-lousing chemicals, because
American authorities thought they had typhus. This continued years
after the typhus epidemic went away. One of those chemicals was
Zyklon-B, which the Nazis used to poison Jewish people (and other minorities and political dissidents).
People
don't belong in cages. Children should not be taken from their
parents without clear and present danger (that somebody else hasn't
manufactured in order
to whip people into a frenzy), and they certainly shouldn't be sold
as commodities by government agencies. Selling human beings doesn't
suddenly become “not slavery” just because it's the government
who's doing it (instead of a “private” slave master).
We
must stop calling refugee encampments “tent cities”, stop calling
forced internment facilities “family detention centers”. We are
looking at literal military prisons,
like the one at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, except they're in Texas; on American soil, within the contiguous 48 states. And they're being used to indefinitely detain people who ought to have their
rights respected; their rights to legal representation, and to apply for citizenship. The existence of embassies does not prove that legal immigration is an easy and realistic solution everywhere; foreign governments are collapsing, and with them, their legitimacy, and thus, people become stateless. As far as I am aware, there is no Anarcho-American embassy at which stateless people can become American citizens (at least not yet).
I want to say that “the inevitable result of this will be martial
law”, but it would be difficult for me to argue that martial law
has not already been in effect for 17, or 40, or 100, or 150,
or even 230 years (respectively, since the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, or
since REX84, or since World War I began, or since the District of
Columbia Organic Act of 1871, or since the imposition of the
Constitution in 1789; however you want to measure it).
Question
#6
How
will Congress – the Senate and the House – be formed as a result
of the midterms? Any guesses? Who will be the leaders?
Answer
#6
I
anticipate that the Democrats will retake the House with a noticeable
majority, and that they will retake the Senate by a noticeable (but
smaller) majority. Given Nancy Pelosi's promise that the Democrats
will not pursue impeachment of Donald Trump (as she did with
Bush when the Democrats regained the House in 2006), I expect that
Nancy Pelosi will encounter a few difficulties convincing her cohorts
to give her her old Speaker position back. But I also suspect that
dirty tricks will be played, and that all opposition to her from
within the party will be easily silenced.
Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez will win her election, and emerge as the new conscience
of the progressive and farthest-left-leaning Democrats; or else she
will be defeated amidst numerous accusations of dirty tricks on the
part of her opponent Joe Crowley. Crowley, for those who don't know,
is one of the Democratic congressmen thought most likely to become
Speaker of the House, in the event that Democrats retake the House.
Maxine Waters becoming Speaker of the House would be political
suicide for Democrats, but I wouldn't put it past them, and I would
understand their rationale for it.
If
Democrats retake the senate, then Dianne Feinstein, Cory Booker,
Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Tammy Baldwin, Russ Feingold, and
Bernie Sanders will comprise the core of the most respected members of Democratic Party
leadership (which finally seems to have begun to loose itself from the
grip of Hillary Clinton, neoliberalism, the New Democratic Coalition,
and the corrupt Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee).
Hopefully
the Democrats will see that what will have made them successful in
the 2018 midterm elections, is their recent embrace of the staunchly
left-leaning ideas which are necessary to fully distance themselves
from what Trump and his loyalists want. Hopefully soon the Democrats
will admit, and not forget, that distancing themselves from
progressivism, socialism, and leftism has not worked out. If they
continue to do so, then they will keep losing elections.
Giving
up hope in places like West Virginia, the Midwest, and the Great
Plains states, just sends the message that the party does not care
about Democrats stuck in red states, even if they could be flipped to
blue with just a little effort. But these states are not thought of
as battleground states, by most popular media, in the same way that
states like Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina are.
Question
#7
The
treasury has announced that there will be an increase in the national
debt for this year of approximately $1.2 trillion. How is this
explained, when Trump in his campaign promised a substantial
decrease?
Answer
#7
Trump
can get away with having a $1.6 trillion deficit if he wanted,
because he'll always be able to say that Obama's highest was $1.7. We
should not underestimate Trump's ability to point to someone who's
behaving worse than he is, and use that to make himself look good and
moral by comparison (even if what they're doing is more or less
equally terrible).
Trump
knows that giving the upper class bigger tax cuts than the ones he
gave to ordinary working people, was only going to help the already
well established entrenched business interests, which often buy and
control our government. He calls them “The Swamp” to his voters,
but he seems to think that the only path to economic growth – the
only way to increase jobs - involves stealing your taxpayer money,
and spending it on his cronies; in the form of bigger tax breaks,
undeserved tax credits, stock buybacks, loans, intellectual property
protections, trade promotions, subsidies, and even bailouts.
Trump
is illiterate constitutionally, economically, historically, and
morally. He is an opportunist, and a narcissist, who has no regard
for other people's needs. He seems to have no guiding political
principle other than “make the trains run on time” and “political
power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. He cares much more about
increasing his own wealth than he does about helping struggling
people who are in need and can't afford to buy stocks. Trump has no
respect for free markets or economic opportunity; and no desire for
lower prices, or even an idea of how to bring prices down to
something his cronies' indentured servants (the people) can afford.
Everyone
is focusing on how much we are spending, and what we're spending it
on; but way fewer people
are talking about where we get our revenue sources from: what we're
taxing, why we're taxing it, and whether the people being taxed,
(first) can afford it, and (second) did anything wrong in the first
place to deserve that “tax” (or, as we Libertarians call it,
“theft”).
Taxing
away all the rewards of making improvements to your own home, doesn't
help people. Confiscating people's earned income doesn't help them.
Confiscating the un-earned
income, and ill-gotten profits, of businessmen who balance their
books on the backs of taxpayers and government contracts
instead of by selling a better product, will
help
ordinary working people.
Paying-off
the national debt is a lot easier than we think it is. If we want to
pay-off $20 trillion dollars, we could pay-off $1 trillion a year for
20 years. If we start now, America can be debt-free by the end of
2038. All we have to do in order to make that happen, is take-in $1
trillion more each year than the amount we spend. As long as we do
that, and total federal government revenue stays above $1 trillion a
year (it's currently at $4 trillion), then we can have any size
government we want, and still balance the budget.
Nothing
is impossible, as long as we don't start-out trying to solve it under
the assumption that it's unsolvable. This is a simple mathematical
equation, yet many of us have apparently lost the ability to think
simply about our problems. Trump's inability to significantly reduce
spending, is compounded by his refusal to lower taxes on those who
need tax breaks most, and his refusal to tackle either the
military-industrial complex, or “The Swamp” of corporate
political donors. That's because he's willing to look the other way
whenever battling America's demons is too risky for him or it doesn't
boost his bottom line.
Originally Written and Published on November 2nd, 2018
Expanded on November 2nd, 2018
