RBG, Like The American Empire, Is Dead

 Eugene V. Debs, quoted in “Debs : His Life, Writings and Speeches (1908)”

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.

RBG, Like The American Empire, Is Dead

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 87, died Friday from metastatic pancreatic cancer. This will create yet another crisis in a country that already had *at least* four major crises that our entire political and economic system was totally incapable of handling. These include the collapse of the economy due to high debt and low consumer spending, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, an explosion of outrage and protest at police brutality and institutional racism which has been met with an explosion of police brutality and institutional racism, and ongoing environmental collapse leading to severe wildfires, increasingly frequent and destructive storms, earthquakes from fracking, wildlife die-off, on and on. 

I’m not celebrating RBG’s death. I am celebrating the death of the illusion. Because it was one of the many illusions standing in the way of people realizing how bad things actually are and actually fighting to make things better. For years many on the left have been saying “Hey if our democracy hinges on one octogenarian with a cancer history maybe we need a better system”, and it’s been ignored and glossed over by people with shirts of Ginsburg with a crown on who laugh at objectively unfunny and exhausting “Notorious RBG” skits on SNL. We’re trying to get people to first see how bad our current system is and second to actually stand up to fight for it to make it better, and it gets ignored by people who focus on the hollow pursuits of electoralism and the graven image of the Supreme Court. 

This isn’t even getting into the problems with RBG, there were many. She called Kaepernick’s protests “dumb and disrespectful”. She had cancer in 1999, and in 2009, and she still didn’t retire. Instead her supporters railed at anyone suggesting that maybe she should. She ruled in favor of a pipeline going over indigenous land in the Appalachians. She considered Scalia a friend and I’d be hard pressed to think of any more thoroughly and *competently* evil person in recent American political history, someone who took literal glee in finding ways to twist the law in the most sadistic and murderous interpretations possible. 

Yet through all of this she was idolized and borderline worshipped by liberals in the US. To such an extent that they are horrified and miserable now that she has, predictably, died. Any criticism of RBG or of the SCOTUS system itself was shouted down. They pinned their hopes on her, a false idol, and now that idol has fallen. They will need to find something new to believe in, and maybe some of them will find something of value to believe in, and I celebrate that fact. 

Political change comes not from figurehead individuals but from movements. This was true of Bernie Sanders, a point I kept trying to make when talking fellow leftists off the ledges after his primary defeats in 2016 and 2020, and it is true of RBG as well. If you have the individual but not the movement, the individual will accomplish nothing. If you have the movement, you cannot be defeated whether you have a figurehead for it or not. 

However, in the US we receive extensive indoctrination and propaganda conditioning us to focus on figureheads. The ruling class has many reasons for that. If we look to a figurehead to lead us, we often don’t do the work ourselves. A figurehead can be stonewalled, subverted, or just plain assassinated. The ruling class has done all three in the past, repeatedly. Relying on figureheads weakens movements. 

The same is true of the conservative side. Liberals, conditioned to believe in figureheads, believe that Trump is the embodiment of the far right movement in our country. They believe that he is an aberration, and that if we just could somehow get rid of him then everything could go back to normal. It is a mirror of their belief that if RBG died then the whole country would be doomed. Both beliefs are dangerous illusions that prevent them from seeing political reality. The entire conservative-fascist movement is not bound up in Trump, he simply represents it, he represents the movement that is already there. 

Liberals need to build their own movement, preferably joining with or becoming leftists to do it, in order to effectively counter the conservative movement. They have #resisted doing this, preferring to put their trust in Clinton, Warren, RBG, and now I guess Biden? As long as these illusions #persist, they will continue to be stymied by the country’s continual conservative movement towards theocratic fascism. 

It is certain to me that the Republicans will absolutely try to get a replacement through before the election, because it’s a win-win for them. If they succeed, then they will have a 6-3 conservative court deciding any of the legal disagreements to come from what will clearly be a very contested election. Any Senators who’d be endangering their seats in a re-election year by supporting Trump will benefit from those legal decisions the same as Trump will. Even if it costs Republicans control of the Senate, that’s still a 6-3 court to shut down any Senate decisions for probably the rest of McConnell’s natural life, unless we get real wild about restructuring our government. Personally I would like to get wild. 

And if they fail to seat a replacement, the election disagreement decisions will still be 4-4 ties and if a higher court ties then the precedent of the lower court stands. Because of Schumer’s steadfast refusal to meaningfully resist Trump and his insistence on rubber stamping Trump’s federal judges, that will still be enough to ensure that the election court cases favor Republicans. Additionally if they don’t seat a replacement then that’s a huge GOTV motivating factor for Republicans, at least as much as it would be for Democrats, particularly because now they’ve got to protect Trump from the obstructionist machinations of Senate Democrats. It will energize conservatives to get as many Democrat Senators out of office as possible. 

What this comes down to is the hard truth that salvation through electoralism is impossible. It always has been. Hopefully now people will see that and be able to move past electoralism. If not now, then in a few weeks when the election is come and gone and Amy McGrath hasn’t won Kentucky despite tens of millions of dollars in out of state donations. In a few weeks when Joe Biden hasn’t won the election despite a non-existent GOTV ground game in swing states and a campaign predicated on yelling at internet leftists and promising to work with Republicans if elected. A lot of people placed their faith and hope, on a distinctly cultish level, in RBG. They had shirts, posters, little idols, shrines, they called her queen. Now she is dead. They need a new place for that hope. 

I too have hope, and have always had hope, that a leftist movement can arise in the US or in what remains of it, and build a better future. The hope in that movement does not rely on any individual. It doesn’t rely on Bernie, or on AOC, or on Nina Turner, or Howie Hawkins. Because of the cult-like beliefs of liberals in their figureheads they believed that when Bernie left the race and told us to support Biden that we would follow our figurehead and do it. Many have not, because Bernie’s value was as a representative of the leftist movement, and if he does not represent the movement anymore, he doesn’t represent us. Good luck to him in all his future endeavors but we’ve got to go on, on our own. 

I also hope that with one less idol to invest their faith in, any liberals who could eventually radicalize and become leftists will do so, and will join us, and we can begin to work on a movement beyond hollow electoralism and voting for corporate candidates in rigged elections. The Supreme Court is lost, the US is lost, the institutions are lost, but we are still here. It is time to mourn what is lost, and to make new systems. We have no other true hope. 

We are living in an empire that is in the process of collapsing. The first thing to do is realize and accept that fact. The second thing to do is realize that the end of the empire is not your end. Many people throughout history, including contemporary to us, have lived through their empire collapsing or their countries becoming failed states. Others have died in the process, but you can also die in a car crash, or a robbery gone wrong, or a sudden brain hemorrhage, or any of a variety of ways. You can die from cancer, at 87 or at 37. A hundred years from now you’ll be as dead from the empire collapsing as you’d be from a heart attack or from dying of old age in your sleep.

Would you like something to do beyond crying over an RBG bobblehead or bringing flowers to the Supreme Court building or voting for a lifelong imperialist with sexual misconduct accusations? Try to organize your workplace. Look into wildcat strikes like the recent teacher strikes. Support other strike actions that are ongoing. Donate to bail funds. Volunteer to drive home people who have been bailed out. Look into mutual aid groups in your area. Volunteer at a food bank, check out Food Not Bombs. Get involved with the DSA if you’re not sure where to start, not that they’re a perfect organization (nobody is perfect and so no organization can be) but they do have a lot of things going that can always use more support. Look into starting a brakelight clinic. Join protests, or bring supplies to protests. Get street medic training. 

Most importantly, make connections within your community. This isn’t an immediate overthrow of the government. It’s going through the hard work of laying a foundation and building a movement. Once you have a solid foundation, once you have been part of building a powerful political movement, nothing will be able to stop it. And then as the American empire and the capitalist system collapse under their own internal contradictions, you will have something ready to pick up the pieces and to build a better world from the aftermath. 

Additional resources:

Kentucky makeover: Amy McGrath challenges Mitch McConnell as a pro-Trump Democrat - July 9, 2019 

https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/2019/07/09/amy-mcgrath-seeks-makeover-pro-trump-democrat/1680960001/

"And you know what? Who stops them along the way? Who stops the president from doing these things? Mitch McConnell," she continued on MSNBC. "And I think that that’s very important, and that’s going to be my message – the things that Kentuckians voted for Trump for are not being done. He’s not able to get it done because of Senator McConnell."

U.S. Justice Ginsburg hits back at liberals who want her to retire - July 31, 2014

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-ginsburg/u-s-justice-ginsburg-hits-back-at-liberals-who-want-her-to-retire-idUSKBN0G12V020140801

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a message for liberals who have been saying the 81-year-old should step down while Democratic President Barack Obama is in office so he can appoint her successor: Who are you going to get who will be better than me?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has Pancreatic Cancer Surgery - Feb. 5, 2009

https://www.webmd.com/cancer/pancreatic-cancer/news/20090205/ruth-bader-ginsburg-has-pancreatic-cancer

Ginsburg, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton, had surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation to treat colorectal cancer in 1999.

Today, Otis W. Brawley, MD, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, issued a statement about Ginsburg's pancreatic cancer. "Justice Ginsburg's success in beating back a diagnosis of colon cancer nearly 10 years ago has inspired and given hope to many in the cancer fight. This new diagnosis [of pancreatic cancer] is unfortunate, and we take hope in reports that this was apparently an early stage of disease, and wish her well, offer our support and prayers, and want to encourage her in what we know is going to be a challenging course of therapy," Brawley states.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Kaepernick protests: 'I think it's dumb and disrespectful' - October 12, 2016
https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/10/politics/ruth-bader-ginsburg-colin-kaepernick/index.html

Of Kaepernick and others she says, she thinks their actions are "dumb and disrespectful".

"I would have the same answer if you asked me about flag burning. I think it's a terrible thing to do, but I wouldn't lock a person up for doing it. I would point out how ridiculous it seems to me to do such an act."

...

Of the athletes, Ginsburg said, "if they want to be stupid, there's no law that should be preventive. If they want to be arrogant, there's no law that prevents them from that. What I would do is strongly take issue with the point of view that they are expressing when they do that."

Mutual Aid Hub - find Mutual Aid groups near you: https://www.mutualaidhub.org/ 

DSA Get Involved - find ways to get involved in the fight for a better future through specific policies, not through following figureheads: https://www.dsausa.org/get-involved/ 

International Workers of the World - Join or support the One Big Union: https://iww.org/

List of Bail Funds for Protesters around the country: https://bailfunds.github.io/ 

War, what is it good for?

Born out of a Twitter argument over the heavy pro-military propaganda that permeates the US military, and my belief that our offensive military is wholly unnecessary and even self-defeating.

"We would still be attacked by North Korea, and possibly other countries without having such defense"

"I mean, this is very basic logic that a child knows, going to school"

It's circular logic.

"We need a powerful military to defend ourselves against countries that we only have hostile relationships with because we have a powerful military."

The United States spends far more on the military than any other country in the world, 37% of the global total military expenditure.

In order to justify this military spending, we are subjected to intense propaganda and indoctrination from childhood (with the upcoming Captain Marvel movie being just one of the latest examples of this) to never even question the money spent on this military. It's no wonder that "a child...going to school" would know this, they've been indoctrinated to worship the military unquestioningly since birth.

Other developed countries with actually defensive militaries are also able to afford universal health care, education that is low or no cost to the student, and a variety of other social safety nets that don't exist in the US. They don't exist here because we spend so much money on the military.
Our military expenditures cost us in a variety of areas including but not limited to life expectancy, literacy, income equality, infant mortality, on and on.

President Dwight Eisenhower, who was also a leading US general during WW2, said in his "A Chance For Peace" speech that:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?

Something that Ike and I have in common that you apparently lack is military service in war.

"But seriously, it is just simple.  Also, what do you even mean by this. It means that other countries would know how much of a risk it is to attack us,if they ever wanted to attack a US state, but you really would like it if we were just defenseless, huh?"

80 million gun owners aren't defenseless.

I support the right of every US resident to be armed. I also support the right of every human being in the world to also be armed. And I support ending all organized militaries worldwide.

"If a country was to attack us, how should we defend ourselves without a military? You seem like you would have an idea."

Let me introduce you to the concept of 4th generation warfare:

Fourth-generation warfare has often involved an insurgent group or other violent non-state actor trying to implement their own government or reestablish an old government over the current ruling power. However, a non-state entity tends to be more successful when it does not attempt, at least in the short term, to impose its own rule, but tries simply to disorganize and delegitimize the state in which the warfare takes place. The aim is to force the state adversary to expend manpower and money in an attempt to establish order, ideally in such a highhanded way that it merely increases disorder, until the state surrenders or withdraws.\

Here's a list of the military numbers for all the militaries of the world  

North Korea has a total military strength of 7.7 million people. South Korea has 6.7 million. Vietnam has 5.5 million (and experience beating the US military). India has 5 million. Russia has 3.4 million. China has 3.2 million. Then you get down to the US with military manpower of 2.2 million.
So, your premise is that one of these states will attack the US. Why? What's their goal? Countries fight wars for a limited number of reasons. Is it

• Destruction?
• Occupation?
• Exploitation of our natural resources?

This is all going to be back of the envelope math.

During WW2, 2 million US enlistees fought in Europe. A total of 16 million enlistees served in the US military during WW2.

This was a massive undertaking that required almost all our industrial productivity to be directed towards producing arms and armor for equipping and transporting all those people to Europe. And literally the only reason we were able to do this is because we didn't fear ground invasion of the US by Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany because of the difficulty involved in getting enough troops across the ocean.

Nazi Germany had a 1939 population of 79 million and a postwar population of 65 million. The Western Front featured from 1944 to 1945 a total of 5.4 million troops that served, while Nazi Germany had 8 million that served. On the Eastern Front, there was around 4 million Nazi troops and close to 7 million Soviet troops.

It took an invasion force of roughly 12.4 million, fighting Nazi forces of roughly 12 million, to defeat Nazi Germany. It took an invasion force the size of roughly 15% of the 1939 German population to successfully overthrow and subsequently pacify Nazi Germany. And all they had to do was effectively cut off the dictatorial head of the country. A majority of the personnel were from countries with a land border with Germany (chiefly Russia).

I bring all that up because the US has a population of 330 million. An invasion force totalling 15% of our population would have to be 51 million people. If the entire military strength of North Korea somehow took to the ocean and managed to transport 7.7 million people to the shores of the US, they would constitute 2.3% of our population, and only 9.6% of our civilian gunowners.

What I'm trying to give you an idea of here is the sheer incredible difficulty involved in pacifying the US in any meaningful way. And that's using WW2 numbers and methods, and 3GW warfare styles.

What's the purpose of these invaders in invading the US? Do they just want to nuke and destroy the US? Why? Not only is there not much reason to just haul off and nuke a country, there's also almost no way to defend against it. And it's not like our entire military might is oriented towards defending against or even retaliating against a nuclear strike.

Maybe they don't want to destroy the US. Maybe the US is nationalizing its oil supply for our own sole use and no longer participating in the global military market and for some reason that leads Russia or something to come in and overthrow our government and secure access to our oil fields.

USMC Smedley Butler, an individual that I feel a great deal of kinship with, said in his "War is a Racket" speech in 1933:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

The whole speech is worth a read

So that's a reason we might be invaded. Capitalism is always a popular reason to invade and overthrow sovereign governments, and if the US wasn't doing it, somebody else might do it to us. Maybe we have oil, maybe we have a suddenly discovered supply of unobtainium under the Rockies, who knows.

How do we defend ourselves?

Let's go back to 4th Generation Warfare. Cutting off the head of our government will be the easier part. It was the easiest part of the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, being completed in both cases in just a few weeks. The Iraq War "ended" and effectively transitioned into the war on ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and the Afghanistan War continues today with the US poised to hand power back to the Taliban.

The Taliban has effectively won the 4GW conflict in Afghanistan. Did they do it through military might? superior strategy? No, they've simply outlasted our will to fight. Afghanistan has an estimated $3 trillion in natural resources, so if the US was interested in conquering it to exploit its mineral wealth we would stand a chance of turning a profit. But not much of one, the war so far has cost over $1 trillion and it looks like that could rise. The Taliban refused to stop fighting.

"But...you don't even know if these 80 million will even fight together?  It does matter. I am sure all these gun owners will not team up to form strategies. What if they are all scattered? What if most of them want nothing to do with the battle? LOTs of factors to think about."

Well, here's the thing about 4GW. You don't want those 80 million to fight together. Our current military methods favor decapitation strikes, take out the C&C (command and control) capabilities and you disorient the lower echelons. A military without a leader can't be decapitated. You don't want all those gun owners to team up to form strategies. You do want them to all be scattered. This is a strength in 4GW, this gives resilience to the resistance.

From the wikipedia on 4GW:

A 4GW enemy has the following characteristics: lack of hierarchical authority, lack of formal structure, patience and flexibility, ability to keep a low profile when needed, and small size. A 4GW adversary might use the tactics of an insurgent, terrorist, or guerrilla in order to wage war against a nation's infrastructure. Fourth generation warfare takes place on all fronts: economical, political, the media, military, and civilian. Conventional military forces often have to adapt tactics to fight a 4GW enemy.

So, don't think of a block of 80 million combatants (and again there's a total of 500 million privately owned firearms, so that 80 million can rise), think of 10 million cells of 8 people apiece. 8 people carrying out a VBIED on an Occupier convoy or ECP. 8 people disrupting a supply shipment to a Forward Operating Base. 8 people carrying out electronic disruption activities. On and on. Another benefit to 4GW is that every one of those combatants looks like everybody else in the country. Combatants blend easily back into the civilian populace at large. Retailiatory actions against the larger community only serve to radicalize even more combatants - exactly what happened in Afghanistan.

You turn the civilian population of the home country against their continuing occupation. Why are their family members going across the sea to the US to die trying to occupy us? What do they have to gain from it? This is one of the ways that the Bolshevik revolutionaries came to power in the Russian Revolution against the backdrop of  WW1; the Tsar chose to fight in WW1, with no clear benefit to the Russian people and plenty of disadvantage. You also see this in the Vietnamese victory against the US in the Vietnam War. The US left because there was no longer civilian support in the US for the war.

You make the war economically expensive. Their occupying military vehicles cost more than, say, a beater dump truck or cement truck. Load it up with cement, armor up the engine block, drive it at the ECP, and have combatants or more VbiEDs blasting in behind it. A Tet Offensive kind of attack. Make it expensive. One of the weaknesses of the US military is how much money we spend per combatant, in training, equipment, infrastructure, and so on. This gives groups like the Taliban a significant economic advantage.

These constant low intensity attacks that require non stop readiness and caution by the occupying military, and I can tell you this based on first hand experience in multiple US war zones, takes a huge psychological toll on the occupying military. You have to always have your eyes open. You have to always be careful and cautious and ready. It wears you down, it makes you less effective. The stress and PTSD and the traumatic brain injuries (TBI) from explosions make suicides more frequent both in-country and after their return. The US military has a suicide rate double that of the civilian population. In 2012, 6500 former US military personnel died by suicide, and more active duty members died from suicide than were killed in combat. This is a side effect of US military imperialism, and supporting US military actions worldwide means supporting this increased suicide rate.

Any occupying force that invades the US with the goal of controlling it would be doomed from day one to fail. It's a simply practical reality, borne out by numerous real world examples, including by the US military itself. Most powerful in the world. Defeated repeatedly by insurgencies.
Any invader would also have to deal with the internal and external risks they would be taking on by mobilizing the necessary military might to conquer the United States. China has bigger problems nearby than the US, like the Uighur insurgency, tensions with India and Russia, and the economic reality that the US is their biggest customer. India has to worry about Pakistan, with both of them nuclear powers, and with a disputed region in Kashmir that they're currently actively fighting over. North Korea invades the US? Then they'd get invaded by South Korea. North Korea invades South Korea? They'd have to deal with the fact that South Korea has a military nearly as large as North Korea and with better nutrition and more technology. Russia invades the US? They don't have the manpower, and they have plenty of internal and regional conflicts to worry about already, like the Ukraine, Georgia, Chechnya, and more. Any invader would face economic sanctions from the other countries of the world, and would also face political isolation.

Or maybe this is a scenario in which a foreign power is systematically conquering other neighboring countries, building up their strength, and then, once they have an empire spanning the entire rest of the globe, they turn their eyes towards the US. And Mexico. And Canada. And central and South America. We would have plenty of time to recreate and remobilize a military, along the lines of WW2, to address such a threat. "We did it before and we can do it again".

You should read the Blowback series by Chalmers Johnson, it does a great job of explaining and contextualizing the costs and problems with our US military. I read it while deployed to Afghanistan and it was a real eye opener.

Fewer Dead Kids

Mass shootings grab our attention and reflect horrifying tragedies. They provoke a reaction. Parents empathize with the parents of those killed. The reaction drives a desire to do anything different, to find a way to keep kids and young adults from dying before their time. People search for any solution, and often are won over by those that sound good.

Everyone wants fewer dead kids.

The understandable desire to want to do something, anything, can easily be redirected into measures that are even more dangerous and would do even more harm than the situation the measures are superficially intended to alleviate. This is true of any new measure or legislation, not just those related to gun violence. Legislation intended to protect sex workers and end human trafficking is putting them at greater risk of rape and murder. The creation of the interstate system ripped up neighborhoods and worsened inner city poverty. Three strikes laws lead to life sentences for minor and often nonviolent offenders.

And then there's the current push for new laws and measures with the goal of fewer dead kids.

The Guardian published an article called "Our manifesto to fix America's gun laws" which says it is written by the Parkland students. A number of ideas are proposed in it, some are okay, like banning bump stocks. Some, like a total ban on semiautomatic firearms, are political nonstarters with their own range of unintended consequences. Others are outright dangerous.

Perhaps chief among those, they say they want to change privacy laws to allow mental healthcare providers to communicate with law enforcement. This entire segment should trigger warning alarms:

“As seen in the tragedy at our school, poor communication between mental healthcare providers and law enforcement may have contributed to a disturbed person with murderous tendencies and intentions entering a school and gunning down 17 people in cold blood. 

We must improve this channel of communication. To do so, privacy laws should be amended. That will allow us to prevent people who are a danger to themselves or to others from purchasing firearms. That could help prevent tragedies such as the Parkland massacre.”

So, destroy patient privacy, or else you don’t want to prevent children from being massacred. Give the police, who do not have a good track record of dealing with the mentally ill, broad access to the health records of the mentally ill. Amend privacy laws to increase law enforcement access to medical records. This should be appalling to anyone familiar with patient privacy. As an example of the unintended consequences of this, law enforcement could check past form 4473s against current medical records showing tox screens or medical marijuana cards and use this to go after gun owners who use medical marijuana.

The vast majority of people with mental health problems are never violent and are in fact more likely to become victims of violence.  

However, the manifesto ignores this, and buys into the right wing methods popularized by Donald Trump, of stigmatizing the mentally ill as expressly and uniquely violent. This is something that will worsen their targeting for violence and discrimination, especially with patient privacy laws “amended”.

The overwhelming majority of firearms deaths are suicides. Suicide also kills more kids 15-19 than homicides. Homicides as well as firearms deaths have been consistently falling in this age range for years. However, suicides are on the rise. Accoding to CDC data for 2015, homicide by firearms was the cause of death for 190 kids aged 5-14. Suicide was the cause of death for 413 kids in the same age range, including 140 suicides by firearms. Most suicide deaths in that age range were hanging/suffocation. This increased stigma and harsh treatment of the neuro-atypical could very well cause more suicides.

The manifesto also says more school resource officers need to be hired. This is dangerous. Police have killed five times more people this year than have died in mass shootings. The proposals do nothing about that, and instead just increase police interaction with young adults. This has been shown to have measurable negative effects on PoC students. Quoting an article by a Juvenile Court Judge:

After interviewing SROs and girls of color, the researchers found that despite the evidence of disproportionate discipline, there is little training provided to SROs to help them understand how to relate to girls of color. Educators often place SROs in a disciplinary role rather than involving them when the need arises around delinquent conduct. SROs lack the cultural competence, trauma-informed skills, gender-responsive approaches, and knowledge of community-based resources needed to help improve school climate for girls of color. 

Through my work as a judge for a juvenile court in Clayton County, Ga., I have seen that this inappropriate use of law enforcement in schools does not improve safety, but actually compromises students' futures. My county's school system began using SROs in 1995, and our referrals to the court increased 1,200 percent by 2003. By collecting data on school arrests, we discovered that our African-American students—male and female—were 12 times more likely to be arrested than our white students. 

In addition, our school district's graduation rate dropped and juvenile crime rates spiked. Research suggests that arresting students for minor offenses significantly increases the likelihood that they will drop out of school. School is one of the strongest buffers against delinquency, and when kids are pushed out, they do not always spend their time wisely.

The minority Parkland students have begun to speak about this:

Kai Koerber, a 17-year-old Marjory Stoneman Douglas student, returned to school after the shooting to see his slain classmates’ empty desks turned into memorials — and a campus swarming with police officers. To him, extra cops around doesn’t mean more people to protect him; it means more chances to become a victim of police brutality. 

Kai worries that police will racially profile students and treat them as “potential criminals,” particularly students of color. 

“It’s bad enough we have to return with clear backpacks,” he said. “Should we also return with our hands up?”

There are no people of color quoted or whose pictures are shown in the Guardian’s reprinting of the Eagle Eye manifesto.

Increasing the stigma and mistreatment experienced by the mentally ill, especially young adults, putting them under a microscope, militarizing their schools, filling them with armed police, ending patient privacy, ending student privacy, treating the mentally ill like they’re all budding violent mass shooters, increasing PoC interactions with school resource officers who put them on the school-to-prison pipeline, these will increase suicide rates as well as incarceration rates.

These are measures which will disproportionately impact minority children.

These are measures which will disproportionately impact children struggling with mental health problems.

These are dangerous and counterproductive measures.

These are measures which will lead to more dead children, not less.

So, what should we do? What are some workable ideas that can lead to less dead kids?

First, end the drug war and focus on treatment and prevention. The war on drugs is the leading driver of homicides and also of our opiod overdose epidemic and also of our bloated prison population. If this seems too big and too hard, consider that there are 300 to 500 million privately owned guns in the US, nobody knows for sure, and yet people seem to think that regulating or even outright banning these will be easier than ending the drug war. Look at the European countries that are consistently held up as examples of places with drastically lower gun deaths. The “drug war” as we know it in the US, and the prison system as we know it in the US, simply does not exist there. Give this article a read. The numbers are staggering, and the beneficial effects of ending the drug war are also staggering. Liberals are willing to call out the NRA and firearms industry for their political involvement, are they as willing to call out the prison industry and pharmaceutical industry?

Second, demilitarize the police and drastically increase oversight of them. This goes hand in hand with ending the drug war. Police have killed five times as many people in 2018 as have been killed in mass shootings. Police shootings disproportionately impact the black community, as police are far more ready to kill black men than anyone else. A big part of this is the black brute myth where police view even unarmed black men as demons with superhuman strength and speed. So, even banning all civilian owned firearms wouldn't protect unarmed black men, as the police literally think they're magic. Additionally the police, including school resource officers, are predisposed to view black children as criminals and treat them accordingly, feeding into a cycle of violence.

Third, increase mental health funding. This is essential to help fight the suicide epidemic And while we’re at it, increase access to all levels of health care. Infant mortality is far too high in the US, particularly among disadvantaged communities. Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate. Heart disease killed 633,842 people in 2015, including 649 children aged birth to 14 and 997 young adults aged 15-24. By comparison, in the same time frame and across all ages, and across accident, suicide, and homicide, 35,486 people died from some form of gun violence. Cancer killed 1,272 children aged birth to 14 in 2015. If we can find cues for some of these diseases, if we can improve treatments, we can save far more lives than any act of gun legislation.

The extensive financial resources that would have to be put into any of the measures recommended in the Parkland manifesto could, if put into other areas, result in a far greater net benefit.

It would mean fewer dead kids.

The question that anti gun liberals need to ask is, what's their motivation? What is the goal?

Is it to score political points against conservatives? To have a victory against the NRA? To restrict sales and use of an object they don't like?

What matters more? Political victories, or the lives of children, the lives of minorities, and of those with mental illness?

Is the goal fewer dead kids?

Finally, our military actions overseas is something many might consider separate from the issue of gun violence in America, but that I think is intertwined with our problems of toxic masculinity and devalued human life. We should slash military funding and dramatically scale back military operations. End the “War on Terror”.

The life of a child is no less valuable for having been born outside of the United States. US military operations have had an incredibly destructive impact on the lives of children in the Middle East.

In 2013, a Pakistani boy named Zubair who was born in 2000 came to the US to speak to Congress. He talked about how he is scared now when the sky is blue, because that’s when the drones come. He and his younger sister were wounded in a drone strike which killed their grandmother as she worked in her garden.

In 2012 a 14 year old boy was killed in another drone strike which struck a group of miners and woodcutters who had gathered for dinner. The drone lingered in the area, and launched a second strike on emergency services and rescuers. This was a “signature strike” where gatherings of military aged males are considered terrorist meetings, even if they’re just workers having a family meal or a family wedding party. These attacks kill kids too, and lead to the mental health issues of anxiety, depression, and PTSD  from their experiences.

It isn’t just Obama’s drone strikes, which were largely ignored or justified clumsily by liberals. In January 2017, an 8 year old American girl was killed in a raid in Yemen approved by Trump. She was shot in the neck and struggled for two hours before dying. That should be hard to read. This is US foreign policy.

The US military’s widespread use of depleted uranium munitions and white phosphorous during the Iraq War has resulted in a legacy of cancer, infant mortality, and severe birth defects.

“Young women in Fallujah,” they wrote, “. . . are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous cancers and leukemias.”

We should be as horrified by this as we are by the school shootings which are occurring in the US at a decreasing rate. 

We should be as willing to protest and stand up to the military industry as we are to stand up to the NRA. 

We should March for Their Lives too.

After all, the goal is fewer dead kids.

Whites are the majority in nearly all large police departments nationwide

Recently I had somebody tell me “most of the thin blue line in many cities are primarily minorities”.

Which sounded wrong. But hey, maybe it’s right. Figured I’d look into it.
I found a website called Governing.com which tracks a lot of government statistics, including those for racial representation in police departments. Their data was pulled from the 2013 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics survey. Then I found a list of the 30 largest cities in the US. I went through the LEMAS data and looked at minority representation on the police forces of these 30 largest cities in the US, particularly relative to the minority population.

What I found did not particularly surprise me.

New York City Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 47.8%
Total Minority Population Share: 67.2%
Percentage-Point Difference: -19.3 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 33% of the city population and 52% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

Los Angeles Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 64.6%
Total Minority Population Share: 71.5%
Percentage-Point Difference: -6.9 (compared to national average of -24.5)
One of the few where whites are a minority on the police force, but still over-represented. Largest minority on the police force is Hispanics, who make up 43% of the LAPD but 49% of the LA population.

Chicago Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 47.9%
Total Minority Population Share: 68.0%
Percentage-Point Difference: -20.1 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 32% of the city population and 52% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

Houston Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 54.9%
Total Minority Population Share: 74.2%
Percentage-Point Difference: -19.3 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 26% of the city population and 45% of the police force. Hispanics sharply under-represented. However, Houston is a rare city where Asian police share and Black police share perfectly match their population share.

Philadelphia Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 43.2%
Total Minority Population Share: 63.6%
Percentage-Point Difference: -20.5 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 36% of the city population and 57% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

Phoenix Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 23.4%
Total Minority Population Share: 54.1%
Percentage-Point Difference: -30.6 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites significantly over-represented, making up 46% of the city population and 77% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

San Antonio Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 57.7%
Total Minority Population Share: 73.4%
Percentage-Point Difference: -15.8 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 26% of the city population and 42% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population. However, despite being under-represented, Hispanics on the police force are a majority (51.5% where they are 63% of the popluation)

San Diego Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 34.3%
Total Minority Population Share: 56.8%
Percentage-Point Difference: -22.4 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 43% of the city population and 66% of the police force. Blacks are accurately represented relative to their population, Hispanics and Asians are sharply under-represented.

Dallas Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 46.2%
Total Minority Population Share: 70.6%
Percentage-Point Difference: -24.4 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 29% of the city population and 54% of the police force. Blacks are accurately represented relative to their population, Hispanics and Asians are under-represented.

San Jose Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 43.7%
Total Minority Population Share: 72.3%
Percentage-Point Difference: -28.6 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 28% of the city population and 56% of the police force. Blacks are slightly over-represented relative to their population, Hispanics are under-represented. Asians are significantly under-represented, constituting 37% of the population and only 3% of the police force.

Austin Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 30.8%
Total Minority Population Share: 50.8%
Percentage-Point Difference: -19.9 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 49% of the city population and 70% of the police force. Blacks are slightly over-represented relative to their population (by 1 percentage point), Hispanics and Asians are under-represented.

Jacksonville Sheriff's Office
Total Minority Police Share: 24.0%
Total Minority Population Share: 45.7%
Percentage-Point Difference: -21.7 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 54% of the city population and 76% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

San Francisco Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 47.6%
Total Minority Population Share: 58.4%
Percentage-Point Difference: -10.8 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 42% of the city population and 52% of the police force. Hispanics are evenly represented. Blacks are fairly significantly over-represented, constituting 9% of the police department but 5.5% of the population, this is very rare. Asians are sharply under-represented.

Indianapolis Metro Police
Total Minority Police Share: 15.8%
Total Minority Population Share: 42.5%
Percentage-Point Difference: -26.7 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites significantly over-represented, making up 57% of the city population and 84% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

Columbus Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 13.6%
Total Minority Population Share: 41.6%
Percentage-Point Difference: -27.9 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites significantly over-represented, making up 58% of the city population and 86% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population. Predictably CPD has had a history of racial misconduct and violence, as well as internal harassment and discrimination against Black police officers.

Fort Worth Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 30.8%
Total Minority Population Share: 59.2%
Percentage-Point Difference: -28.3 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites significantly over-represented, making up 41% of the city population and 69% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 22.8%
Total Minority Population Share: 55.8%
Percentage-Point Difference: -33.0 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites significantly over-represented, making up 44% of the city population and 77% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

Seattle Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 24.7%
Total Minority Population Share: 34.0%
Percentage-Point Difference: -9.3 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 66% of the city population and 75% of the police force. Blacks are slightly over-represented relative to their population (by 1 percentage point), Hispanics and Asians are under-represented.

Denver Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 32.9%
Total Minority Population Share: 47.1%
Percentage-Point Difference: -14.1 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 53% of the city population and 67% of the police force. Blacks are accurately represented relative to their population, Hispanics and Asians are under-represented.

El Paso Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 81.1%
Total Minority Population Share: 85.1%
Percentage-Point Difference: -4.1 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites are narrowly over-represented, making up 15% of the city population and 19% of the police force. Minorities are narrowly under-represented, with Hispanics making 80% of the population and 77% of the police, and Blacks making 3.1% of the population but 2.9% of the police, however these margins are incredibly narrow. Overall it’s probably the most balanced of any major metropolitan police department in the country. Also one of the few where minorities are a majority of the force.

Detroit Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 66.9%
Total Minority Population Share: 91.6%
Percentage-Point Difference: -24.6 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 8.5% of the city population and 33% of the police force. Blacks are under-represented (81% of population) but are a majority (63%) of the police force. Hispanics and Asians are under-represented.

Washington Metropolitan Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 68.4%
Total Minority Population Share: 64.5%
Percentage-Point Difference: 3.8 (compared to national average of -24.5)
The only city  in the 30 largest cities in the US where whites are under-represented relative to their population, 32% of the police force compared to 36% of the population. Blacks are over-represented and a majority of the police force, 59% to 49%. Hispanics and Asians are under-represented. Given the prevalence of federal law enforcement in DC, its possible that whites in DC interested in law enforcement tend to go that route instead.

Boston Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 34.5%
Total Minority Population Share: 53.8%
Percentage-Point Difference: -19.4 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 46% of the city population and 66% of the police force. Blacks are slightly over-represented relative to their population (by 1.5 percentage point), Hispanics and Asians are under-represented.

Memphis Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 51.9%
Total Minority Population Share: 73.0%
Percentage-Point Difference: -21.1 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 27% of the city population and 48% of the police force. Blacks are under-represented (63% of population) but are a slim majority (51%) of the police force. Hispanics and Asians are under-represented.

Nashville Metro Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 15.1%
Total Minority Population Share: 43.9%
Percentage-Point Difference: -28.9 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites significantly over-represented, making up 56% of the city population and 85% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

Portland Police Bureau
Total Minority Police Share: 14.6%
Total Minority Population Share: 28.0%
Percentage-Point Difference: -13.4 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 72% of the city population and 85% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

Oklahoma City Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 14.5%
Total Minority Population Share: 44.2%
Percentage-Point Difference: -29.7 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites significantly over-represented, making up 56% of the city population and 86% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 19.1%
Total Minority Population Share: 54.7%
Percentage-Point Difference: -35.6 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites significantly over-represented, making up 45% of the city population and 81% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

Baltimore Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 49.3%
Total Minority Population Share: 71.9%
Percentage-Point Difference: -22.6 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 28% of the city population and 51% of the police force. Blacks and Asians are under-represented on the police force compared to their population. This is a rare city where Hispanics are over-represented relative to their population, 7% police compared to 4.5% of the population.

Louisville Metro Police Department
Total Minority Police Share: 15.2%
Total Minority Population Share: 32.3%
Percentage-Point Difference: -17.1 (compared to national average of -24.5)
Whites over-represented, making up 68% of the city population and 85% of the police force. All minorities are under-represented on the police force compared to their population.

Cities where all minorities combined are a majority of the police force: Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, Detroit, Washington DC, and Memphis.

Cities where whites are a minority of the population but a majority of the police force: NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Austin, San Francisco, Fort Worth, Charlotte, Boston, Las Vegas, and Baltimore.

Of course, all cops are bastards anyway. Regardless of race, through their actions as police they support capitalism and the racist police state while protecting the wealthy ruling class.

But the additional concern I have is that when you have a police force that doesn't reflect the community it polices, skin color becomes a uniform (thanks Vonnegut) and the white police see themselves as an occupying paramilitary force in an area that is more like a foreign country than their own homeland. And when you look at things from a military perspective you see your fellow citizens as the enemy.

The widespread infiltration of US police forces by white supremacists over the last few decades, and really as long as there have been US police forces, just makes this worse. This also leads "Thin blue line" police supporters to gravitate towards racist positions, and even worse it can push minority officers towards self hating internalized racism that expresses itself in their community interactions because they see their allies as uniformed whites and their day to day enemies as the PoC communities they police.

It is not a sustainable situation and only highlights the need to disarm and disband all police in the US.

The US needs easy and streamlined citizenship for all

“But they broke the law!”

This plaintive cry is heard across the country, seen on message boards and facebook pages, vomited out over talk radio. It pushes a mindset that any sort of tyrannical government action against undocumented immigrants is justifiable. Any sort of violence, indignity, or moral outrage is acceptable, simply because “they’re here illegally”. It makes them an unperson, and history shows what countries do with people they consider unpersons. Slavery. Confinement. Deportation. Mass murder.

So, these ostensible “illegal immigrants” are here because “they broke the law”. What does that mean? Why does it matter? Let’s look briefly at the history of immigration law in America. Spoiler alert: It’s all racist. All of it. Here’s a timeline.

The very first naturalization law in the US limited citizenship to free white males. Nobody else could become a naturalized citizen. That was the law. 

In 1830, the Indian Removal Act was passed by Congress, legalized the forced displacement of all Native Americans to west of the Mississippi. That was the law. 

After the war with Mexico, when the US forcibly annexed large sections of Mexican land, they gave Mexicans living there the “option” to become citizens if they stay. But they only have rights to the land they owned if they could prove in US courts with US lawyers that they have those rights. That was the law. 

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which among other things allowed a black person to be enslaved simply on the testimony of a single white person that the black was already a slave, with no method for challenging this in court. That was the law. 

Many Northern States and cities refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, becoming sanctuary cities for escaping slaves. Slave State outrage at this defiance of the law was one of the reasons expressly and explicitly given for their secession and the subsequent American Civil War:

The faithless conduct of our adversaries is not confined to such acts as might aggrandize themselves or their section of the Union. They are content if they can only injure us. The Constitution declares that persons charged with crimes in one State and fleeing to another shall be delivered up on the demand of the executive authority of the State from which they may flee, to be tried in the jurisdiction where the crime was committed. It would appear difficult to employ language freer from ambiguity, yet for above twenty years the non-slave-holding States generally have wholly refused to deliver up to us persons charged with crimes affecting slave property. Our confederates, with punic faith, shield and give sanctuary to all criminals who seek to deprive us of this property or who use it to destroy us. This clause of the Constitution has no other sanction than their good faith; that is withheld from us; we are remediless in the Union; out of it we are remitted to the laws of nations.

After all, turning in "stolen property", escaped slaves, was the law.

Even after the Civil War when it became legal for African-Americans to become naturalized citizens, naturalization was still expressly forbidden for Asian immigrants. That was the law. 

During this time, the immigration and naturalization process for European whites was simple. Get on a boat to America. Get off the boat. You’re a legal immigrant. You could not be a white illegal immigrant. That was the law. That’s how my family came here, in the 1680s, the 1740s, the 1830s. We just got off a boat. For years there were no laws limiting the immigration of white Europeans. 

1882 is when the first immigration law is passed. It was the “Chinese Exclusion Act”, which prohibited Chinese immigration for 10 years. It was renewed, and remained law until 1943. No Chinese. That was the law. 

The Immigration Act of 1917 established an “Asian Barred Zone” which expanded the prohibitions on Asian immigration to effectively encompass all Asians from southern and eastern Asia. Japan was excluded, as were the US territories in Guam and the Philippines. Included was everyone from Turkey to India to Thailand to Vietnam to Indonesia and more. They could not be legal immigrants. That was the law.

The Immigration Act of 1924 targeted eastern and central Europeans, placing strict quotas on immigration, in a reflection of the Eugenics-heavy legislative mindset at the time. These restrictions would over the next twenty years serve to keep European Jews fleeing the Holocaust locked out of the US. For example, the MS St. Louis was blocked from even docking at a US Port, and all of its 900 Jewish refugees were prohibited from entering the US, resulting in 254 of them dying in the Holocaust. That was the law. 

In 1935 the Filipino Repatriation Act offered free transportation to Filipinos who would
return to the Philippines, and it restricted future immigration to the U.S. The Philippines were a US territory, won in the Spanish-American War, but the US didn’t want too many of those foreign Filipinos settling in the US. So a law was passed.

It wasn’t until the 50s and 60s that the old expressly racist immigration laws were repealed, and new more inclusive immigration laws put into place. But we have so much further to go. Let’s talk about the present and the future.

What Baby Boomers’ Retirement Means For the U.S. Economy

All else equal, fewer workers means less economic growth. One way to measure this is a figure known as the “dependency ratio,” or the number of people outside of working age (under 18 or over 64) per 100 adults between age 18 and 64.2 The higher the ratio, the worse the news: If more of the population is young or old that leaves fewer working-age people to support them and contribute to the economy.

Immigrants boost America’s birth rate

POLITICS and sheer hatred aside, there is no shortage of blind spots in the rationale behind America’s mounting restrictions on immigration. Immigrants are a boon to America in many ways. For one, they do plenty of jobs that native-born Americans shun—including what most parents would agree is the ultimate labour of love: having babies. 

For decades America’s birth rate has been stuck below the level at which a given generation replaces itself. This means that without a steady influx of young migrants down the line there will be fewer working-age people supporting a greater number of retirees. But according to analysis published earlier this week by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, things would have been worse if it weren’t for immigrants. They make up 13% of the population but nearly a quarter of births in 2015 were to immigrant women.

The US has a demographic balloon. Record numbers of boomers are retiring, while new births have dropped off sharply. We need people. We need people to support those retiring, we need them as a base of workers and as a tax base. Even if we were to somehow abolish capitalism and the state we’d still need younger people to support the larger numbers of older people.

We need immigrants. We need immigrants who are working above board so they can’t be abused and exploited by their employers. We need immigrants who can have stable jobs and stable homes without living in fear of ICE thugs tearing them out and throwing them into jail in the middle of the night. We don’t have a meaningful social safety net now. We don’t have public health care. We don’t have a basic income. Immigrants really *can’t* “mooch” off the US. They can and they do contribute to society, extensively.

The Obama Administration, for all its faults, put a lot of work into pointing out the advantages of streamliming a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants already in the US. These arguments transition to a streamlined process for all immigrants.

As highlighted in the report, a range of economic research has shown that immigrants living and working in the United States without authorization are earning far less than their potential, paying much less in taxes, and contributing significantly less to the U.S. economy than they would if they were given the opportunity to gain legal status and earn U.S. citizenship. According to outside estimates, providing earned citizenship for these workers would increase their wages and, over 10 years, boost U.S. GDP by $1.4 trillion, increase total income for all Americans by $791 billion, generate $184 billion in additional state and federal tax revenue from currently undocumented immigrants, and add about 2 million jobs to the U.S. economy.

So, immigration laws have been historically racist. Trump is actively working to make them more racist. Their current enforcement is absolutely racist. But we need immigrants, badly. What we need to do is streamline the immigration and naturalization process dramatically.

Citizenship should be no more complicated than going to the courthouse, paying for a filing fee and background check, no more than $200, and after the background check goes through, they’re citizens. Just that simple.

If you’re worried about violent gangs like MS 13 or Mexican cartels taking advantage of this, end the drug war and stop destabilizing Central and South American governments. Easy fix.

The benefits of this would be huge:

• Employers could no longer freely exploit undocumented workers, terrorizing them into compliance through the threat of deportation.
• The tax base would be expanded, and jobs would be created, because immigrant communities could all operate above board.
• Skilled and unskilled workers, both of whom are necessary for the economy, would come from around the world to a newly welcoming America. 
• Crime in immigrant communities would no longer be underreported by witnesses who fear deportation from drawing attention to themselves. 
• We would save the billions of dollars wasted now on border wall boondoggles and ICE enforcement and removal thugs. (It goes without saying that without a drug war we won’t need to try and have a “Fortress America” level of border security.) 
• We would also save an incredible amount of money and easy pressure on the courts system as we remove the majority of the need for immigration courts, where we spend $2 billion a year now.

And, of course:

The rights guaranteed by US citizenship should be natural and inalienable human rights anyway.

These are rights that we have championed all over the globe, whose praises the US has sung, authentically or not, hypocritically or not, since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

It’s time to stand up to racism and to exploitation, and to embrace the idea of streamlined citizenship. Let’s make the United States as easy for the world to emigrate into as it was for centuries of Europeans.

And it’d finally put to rest the angry screams of “THEY’RE JUST ENFORCING THE LAW” and “ILLEGALS BROKE THE LAW”.

No, We Can't All Just Get Along With The Rise Of Genuine Textbook Fascism In America

A friend on Facebook who has the misfortune of having Trump supporters as friends asked them why they support Trump. What followed was a stream of Fox News propaganda and alt-right conspiracy theories, lunatic memes propagated through the American political zeitgeist like Kaposi's Sarcoma‎ through the body of an HIV victim. I won't punish anyone by repeating them all, but this one stuck out as particularly bad, and terrifying.

Obama had BLM in the WH. They are a terrorist group, and will be labeled as such soon. Cop killers in the WH sucks & so does the potus!

After 15 years of the War on Terror, what do we do with terrorists? We jail them indefinitely sometimes. More often, we kill them. Classifying someone as a terrorist means you take out their vehicle or wedding party or house with a Hellfire launched from Nellis, or you light them up with an Apache, or Marines take them out. We kill terrorists.

Black Lives Matter is a political movement, one I consider myself part of, that believes the police are far too ready to use and misuse deadly force, and that they do not have enough legal accountability for this, and that people are too ready to excuse them when people, predominantly African-Americans, die as a result.

For example, in florida this week a black behavorial therapist was shot by a cop while the therapist tried to calm an autistic patient in his care. When the black man, who thankfully survived, asked the cop why he was shot, the cop said "I don't know."

Let that soak in, because it's terrifying. It'd be even more terrifying if I was a black man, but as I possess empathy and common decency I can at least try to imagine how terrifying it would be to be in that position. What's more, that black man had been lying down on the ground with his hands in the air explaining to the police what was happening and that the autistic man had a toy truck. There is nothing more he could have done to comply and be non-threatening, but he couldn't change his skin color.

So, that's why Black Lives Matter exists. But to that Trump supporter, we're a terrorist movement. And in the US we kill terrorists.

After everything went to fucky fuck hell, the friend who'd asked the question initially made another post bemoaning the lack of unity and civility in American politics.

How can we expect our leaders to work across the aisle when we can't do the sane with our friends and neighbors? I asked a question to Trump supporters today and was shocked at how rapidly it turned partisan. What I found, in my opinion, is we share many of the same concerns. For me the only major difference is immigration. I do believe we need to put aside our preconceived notions of what a conservative and liberal are and speak to each other with a more open mind and try understand why others hold the beliefs they have.

The white woman who'd called BLM terrorists replied to this blaming us, and also quite inaccurately calling me a Clinton supporter, saying

Your Hillary friends started the insults & mud slinging. You asked your Trump friends for their opinion and we're getting good feedback until the Hillary supporters started attacking. Just saying. Go figure.

My own response to his post is reproduced below in its entirety:

I have no interest in a conversation with people who think Black Lives Matter activists, and I count myself among BLM supporters, are a terrorist movement.

Trying to "reach across the aisle" and sing kumbaya is a great thing but when you do that with the wrong people, people who hate you, people who want you dead, you're just putting your back in easy reach for them.

Americans need to wake up to the fact that we don't have gentlemanly political disagreements here any more than the competing political parties in the Weimar Republic had. We have open racist sexist fascism. Literal fucking fascism, and it wants us dead. 

Falling prey to the fallacy of the golden mean in this environment means you wind up half dead. Fascists who take power, people who think that annoying pesky protesters can be dismissed and summarily eradicated as terrorists, don't throw you halfway out of a helicopter just because you're a nice guy centrist. You either march in lock step or they will fucking kill you. 

The American South is littered with graves, marked and unmarked, of people during the civil rights movement who thought just being a good person was good enough until they ran into a deputy sheriff or sheriff allied with the KKK. 

I'm not a Hillary supporter (although it is easy for small minds capable only of binary thought to sort all "enemies" into one group), I'm not a liberal, I am an anti-fascist. That doesn't lead to me supporting friendly fascists like Clinton any more than it leads to me supporting unfriendly lowest common denominator fascists like Trump. 

It's easy to understand why other people have the ideas they have. The economy is shit in the US thanks to capitalist exploitation. As during the Depression era Weimar Republic, in the absence of class consciousness people who are poor or middle class, who have enough to be afraid of losing it, can be easily manipulated by a charismatic rabble rouser into hating different races and ethnic groups. Until we find a way to increase class consciousness racism will still be the default go to for the explanation of how shitting poor peoples lives are.

It's easy to understand why Mussolini rose to power, or why Franco's fascists in Spain rose to power, or why Pinochet came to power in Chile and started chucking intellectuals out of helicopters. It's easy to understand the motivations for people who enable tyrants. Hitler wrote extensively about what he was doing and how he was doing it while he was doing it, and there are no great secrets there. That we understand them doesn't make them any less imminently dangerous. I can understand sarin gas or botulinum or a scorpion but it doesn't make them any less deadly.

I'm distinguishing genuine racist fascists from all Trump supporters. There's a lot of overlap in the venn diagram, but there may be some people who support Trump who aren't fascists and who can be talked to and reasoned with. However, it would be extremely difficult because the one single overarching common element I see between every single statement I've ever seen made by Trump supporters is uniformly they are profoundly misinformed. They have a view of the world that demonstrably doesn't match up to reality. 

And what's worse is that when you point it out, they don't care. You can point out extensively sourced rebuttals of what they hold as articles of faith, and it just washes over them. You can't have a discussion or gentleman's agreement with that either. It isn't a philosophical difference or different values prioritized, it's a belief that 2+2 = 9/11Benghazi.