Immigration or invasion?

I wrote this many years ago now; maybe a little after 2000 for Indiana Policy Review.  Immigration isn’t the issue du jour at present that it was at the time, but just wait…we ain’t seen nothin’ yet…

Laws are words; let’s get them straight. “Immigration” is when somebody lawfully moves from one place to another.  “Illegal aliens” are those who cross borders in violation of laws. Tens of millions of illegal aliens are, what; is “invasion” too strong a word?  Whatever it’s called; when it goes on for decades while we wait for federal action – or worse, when it’s caused by federal action, it’s stupid.

This July 4, let us remember that a truly federal government is allowed only a few powers.  Each state is otherwise just as sovereign as other states around the world such as France or China. Article 4, Section 16 of the Indiana Constitution reserves for the Indiana legislature all necessary powers of “a free and independent state.” Article 5, Section 12 says, “The Governor shall be commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and may call out such forces, to execute the laws, or to suppress insurrection, or to repel invasion.” Most people have no idea that states legally have so much might.

The U.S. Constitution’s Article I, Section 8 grants the U.S. Congress power, “To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” The 14th Amendment to that contract says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside,” because through the War Between the States it was assumed that each state had the right to determine who had rights of citizenship and who didn’t.  Of course, the proviso, “ . . . and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means that some are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States; but the U.S. Constitution says nothing else about aliens, other than they can’t hold federal office.

Article I, Section 10 details the powers prohibited from the states, yet nothing limits any state’s authority over illegal aliens within its borders.  In fact, this section’s prohibition against states declaring war is restrained by, “ . . . unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”

Arizona’s S.B. 1070 has made news, but in fact Article II, Section 35 of the Arizona Constitution already specifically denies illegal aliens citizen rights. Article XVIII, Section 10 actually denies illegal aliens any employment rights.

So, by the existing laws (paying special attention to the federal 10th Amendment), states already have both the authority and power to maintain constitutional rights and order within their borders.  No new laws, no new powers are needed.

That said, our illegal alien problems aren’t about illegal aliens, their crimes or even the “Reconquista” nationalism of many.

Our problems, both with immigration and otherwise, are more fundamentally with socialism.

Even without its inevitable corruption and political oppression, socialism makes each citizen pay for others’ lifestyles, accidents, schooling and healthcare.  The collectivist hooks we stick into each other, even with the best of intentions, will tend to make us want our fellows to stay out of our wallets, cough up money from theirs, and die quickly, before Social Security checks start going to them at our expense.

The hooks make us care about what others eat, drink or smoke.  Hooks make us care about who others date, how others live and what others can and cannot own.  Socialism is inherently, demonstrably, nosy, jealous, covetous and antisocial.

The whole point of our constitutions is to prohibit this cold, starving, jealous existence, thank God.

But what most people gripe most about illegal aliens is that we have to pay for them!  That’s not their fault, that’s ours.  It’s also not a particularly valid fear, because aliens, illegal and otherwise, both contribute more to the economy than they take out, but are also necessary to make our Pyramid-Scheme social “safety net” programs work for even the short term.

They’re also willing labor that helps employers get around the laws that make “legal” labor impractical or impossible.  And they do pay payroll taxes.

We need more people paying payroll tax per retiree.  Our domestic-born population is shrinking, you know.  That’s bad math for both Social Security and Medicare.

And the overwhelming majority of the people pouring across our borders up to now are doing so to find a better life.  They’re escaping war-torn, corrupt, drug-war-disrupted nations in hopes of raising their kids in peace and prosperity.  Wouldn’t you do the same?

Heck; we’re the ones who’ve messed up their country in most cases.  Our drug prohibitions, our “nation building,” our propping-up of dictators who’d otherwise fall…  This is the least harmful blowback we suffer from our international nannying, meddling and bullying.  It could get a LOT WORSE!

Imagine all the people in the world we’ve been bombing and manipulating for generations – Middle East, Africa, Central America…what if they see our open border as an invitation to get back at us?  Or what if a more powerful enemy decides that military invasion can be a quiet, gradual, subtle thing?

Or on an even more simple level, what if a bunch of people decide to just walk in and replace the “indigenous population” and thus create a whole new country?

…Isn’t that latter “immigration” how this country, and its experiment in liberty started?  Couldn’t that be how that experiment ends?

Your government is corrupt. Very, very corrupt.

We all know it to at least some degree.

I suppose we don’t react to it in any useful way because it has happened gradually, over several generations, in a sort of frog-in-the-cook-pot scenario.  And maybe we just can’t picture anything better than what we’ve suffered all our lives.

But I don’t know why we even talk about ideology or “issues” until we deal with this:  The two private clubs called the Democratic and Republican Parties are:

1. Corrupt organizations operating illegally, as I’ll substantiate below.  They are crime rings enabling and fronting worse crime rings.
2. Owned by pretty much the same people. The small variation in owner pools (a few seemingly opposing corporations, unions, and “special interest groups”) don’t make any difference in political reality, because the major shareholder of both parties are the same bankers, military industrialists and energy, transportation, insurance, agri/pharma and debt services companies.
3. They do pretty much the same thing in rising spending, debt, militarization (both global and domestic), spying, lying and selling out.  They’re both authoritarian, corrupt and think we’re their servants.

Let’s end the charade.  The thieving, deadly game of false dichotomies we call “The Two Party System” should be revealed for what it is …a sock-puppet show that distracts us from the real behind-the-scenes truth that our government is a crony crime network.   Their modus operandi and stock in trade is division and conflict; categorizing people and then setting us against each other; both here and everywhere on earth.

And this isn’t petty crime.  No other gangs on earth steal so much or kill so many either directly or by their violent black markets, puppet dictators and covert collusion.  This isn’t tin-foil-hat hyperbole.  It’s fact.  Let’s stop acting like it’s not.

Realistically, there are no other issues worth discussing until we deal with this one.  All other serious problems are just symptoms of a government gone very bad…and very well-armed against us.

A dozen Presidents warned us about the people who have made the world their ATM and battle ground.  But over generations, the factions controlling our government have become ever-bolder in their violations of written, practical and moral laws.

To banish any possibility of doubt about the “stacked deck” of our elections:

Special privileges and powers granted to a class of citizens called a “major political party,” as defined and implemented in Indiana, are of course illegal by the Indiana Constitution’s Article I, Section 23:

“The General Assembly shall not grant to any citizen, or class of citizens, privileges or immunities, which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens.”

Here is a small sampling of special privileges and immunities just here in Indiana:

By creating arbitrary thresholds (Ind. Code § 3-10-1-2) that suppress all other candidates and political organizations, they have granted themselves taxpayer funded primary elections, which implicitly provide more money, public attention, free advertising and media promotion to only Democrats and Republicans at the actual expense of all alternatives.

Ind. Code § 6-4.1-4 specifies that members of the Indiana Election Commission “must be a member of a major political party.”  And Ind. Code § 6-4.1-4 grants that only “the state chairman of the major political party” has powers of nomination and appointments for succeeding terms.  Only designees “of the state chairman of each of the major political parties” shall “serve as members of the state recount commission.” (Ind. Code § 3-12-10-2.1)

Ind. Code § 3-10-1-4 grants only major political parties privileges of organization (precinct committeeman are a special class of citizen who have special powers [example, Ind. Code § 3-13-1-4, 5, 6], yet aren’t subject to the limitations placed on other political officeholders [Ind. Code § 3-6-1-15]) and process for nomination to public office and filling vacancies (e.g., Ind. Code § 3-13-5, 6).

Ind. Code § 3-10-1-15 sets apart a separate ticket for “each political party holding a primary election” making all alternative candidates inconspicuous to voters.

And to be clear…the Democratic and Republican Parties have, with the power they won during WWII (when most other parties, like the once-powerful socialist parties became discredited by their association with the USSR and Nazi/socialist Germany, and the opposite ideologies were overwhelmed by the USA’s new imperialism and nationalism), wrote themselves power over everybody else.  Only they are “major political parties.”  Only they get all the freebies, special powers and exemptions, and the ability to ignore laws anyway.

In case you think that writing words into Indiana Code can make anything legit, Indiana Constitution’s Article I, Section 25 makes it clear that legislation cannot transgress the constitution:

“No law shall be passed, the taking effect of which shall be made to depend upon any authority, except as provided in this Constitution.”

The evidence of corruption is everywhere.  The correlation between campaign donations (business investments that pay multi-thousand-percent dividends) and legislation, the revolving door between regulators and the regulated, the hand-in-glove relationship between lobbyists and lawmaking, the insider trading that’s illegal everywhere but in the halls of power, the obvious payola, pork and conflicts of interest are so well documented by both “left” and “right” media as to be the most universally known and completely inexcusable part of this problem.

It’s not just academics, advocacy groups, bloggers, wonks and journalists who’ve told us about corruption.  Our own US Presidents, from the very first one, tried to clue us in.  President George Washington warned us against not just the existence of political parties, but also the entrenched corruption that invariably sprouts from such tribalism.  In 1834 Andrew Jackson called Central Banks, “… a den of vipers and thieves.  I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, I will rout you out!”  In 1912, after decades of rising cronyism, President Woodrow Wilson wrote that, “… we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.”  In 1961, President Eisenhower warned us against “…the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

What’s particularly of note today is what else Eisenhower said in that same speech: “Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

We should have heeded the warnings.  We should have noticed when the warnings stopped.

Personally, I don’t care what politicians do on their free time and with their own money.  They can have affairs with every sort of willing creature(s), and snort all the coke that Marion Barry missed, and I won’t care a whit.

But all the stealing and defrauding and needless, groundless war has got to stop.

And it won’t stop until we turn against the corruption that fuels all the worst of human actions.

Come on…we know this one.  Our government, from the Precinct Committeeman who gets special business contracts and a summer job for his son on the DOT, to the bankers who own and operate most of the world, is corrupt from stem to stern, from keel to crow’s nest.

So let’s fix it.

There are two parts to this:

1. Recognizing how we got here.

2. Choosing something else.  That means, of course, anything but the Two Party Puppet Show.

We got to where we are because authoritarian corruption is where people usually go.  It’s what happens when you stop fighting it, and it’s why all civilizations eventually fail.
And in the case of the USA and its democratic elections, we didn’t just fall into humanity’s default state of corrupt government, we voluntarily chose it, and kept choosing it with a >90% reelection rate.
And, if I can believe my ears and eyes, will likely choose it again in 2016.

Of course I hope I’m wrong about that last part.

So…

1. We have to change ourselves. Our choices must change.  Our actions must change.  We must do our homework before we vote, after we vote, and whenever we feel like caring about our lives, liberties and property.  We can stop voting for the same people and parties that we know are corrupt.  We can vote for alternatives that, up to now, have been getting only single-digit support.

2. And to do that, I think we need to imagine a better way to live. We need to stop putting so crazy-much trust in politicians, and show a little skepticism with their promises.  We need to see more ways to do things through the free market (look up what this really is if you think the Free Market is the bad guy…we have crony capitalism, not free markets).  If we can picture a better life, we can choose it.  If we choose it, we’ll get it.

This last part is critical.  Simply voting for alternative candidates won’t fix a thing because it’s fixing the wrong thing.

First, comes us.  Nothing gets better until We The People do.

We must change our own hearts and minds.  We must develop a picture of how we should live, and then, dammit, choose that life!

I shouldn’t have to prove that constitutional rule of law under our existing state and federal constitutions as written would be a great start.  I’ve been trying to prove it for decades now (to little effect).  But ultimately, nobody can make you read the constitutions or choose wisely.

That has to come from you.

I’m hoping that what I’m offering here is a first step in recognizing that we have a terrible, terrible problem.

And I’m hoping you know that it’s in your power to fix it.  If we could get more people to see only that, we could be on the path to a better future…as opposed to the more usual cataclysm…which, I hope you can see, is just around the corner.

Liberty or Bust!